Indian officials announced today, Tuesday, that rescuers have retrieved all 41 construction workers who had been trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayan region for 17 days. This operation took hours of breaking rocks, concrete blocks, and soil to reach them. The evacuation of the workers began more than six hours after rescuers successfully navigated the debris in the tunnel that collapsed on November 12 in Uttarakhand state.
Rescuers used wheeled stretchers to pull the construction workers through a 90-centimeter wide steel pipe, and the entire process was completed in about an hour. Ambulances had earlier lined up at the tunnel entrance to transport the workers to a hospital located approximately 30 kilometers away. While trapped inside the tunnel, the workers received food, water, light, oxygen, and medicine through a pipe before their rescue. Authorities did not specify the cause of the collapse, but the area is prone to landslides, earthquakes, and floods.
