Rescue work continues for missing individuals

And amidst these two conflicting emotions, hundreds of rescue workers for various agencies continued to battle their way, foot by foot, inside the SLBC tunnel in Nagarkurnool district on Friday, in search of the eight workers whose location still remained uncertain seven days after a section of the tunnel collapsed.

On Thursday came the first significant development in the search for the missing persons with a team of scientists from the Hyderabad-based National Geophysical Research Institute, armed with a ground penetrating radar (GPR), reporting to the officials overseeing the rescue operations that they discovered some ‘anomalies’ in their GPR test reports after a night-long exercise inside the tunnel.

This sparked a frenzy of reports that officials had found the location of the missing workers’ bodies. Nagarkurnool district collector Badavath Santosh quickly declared that this was ‘fake news’ and that any development or discovery would be informed officially.

According to Arvind Kumar, special chief secretary, disaster relief, the NGRI team reported that they found some anomalies at a few places. “We asked them if they could be bodies but were informed that this was hard to say. The anomalies could be some other lighter material amidst the debris. Our teams are trying to find out more, but the challenges that continue to remain is that water is still flowing into the tunnel, and the depth at which these anomalies have been found,” he said.

Arvind Kumar, who is coordinating all the rescue efforts and individual tasks assigned to the various agencies involved in the rescue, said that in the meanwhile, the speed of removing the accumulated silt was picking up. “This is being done in shifts, and workers from SCCL joined in this task today with 60 members per shift. The South Central Railway has sent a second ultrathmeric cutter which will help in speeding up the cutting of the TBM parts and make the debris filled last section of the tunnel more accessible for the rescue teams,” he said.

N. Balram, chairman and managing director of Singareni Collieries Company Limited, who is leading a 250-member team of miners and rescue workers, said “the TBM was broken into two, with the cutting head lying towards the blocked end of the tunnel, while the rear portion of the machine was thrown back some 300 metres. Our workers have reached the 13.9 km mark to check the conditions and have joined the clean-up efforts and are working in four shifts.”

Balram said that it was too early to make out anything from the NGRI findings at this point of time and that he had requested that the scientists try and provide clearer results by taking up another survey. “Cleaning up the access by cutting the TBM parts and the slush to reach the end of the tunnel where most of the debris is, might take a day or two,” he said.