Indian rescuers have drilled through rocks and debris to reach 41 workers trapped for 17 days in a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas, and were set to pull them out one by one to safety, officials said.<\/p>\n
The men, low-wage workers from India’s poorest states, have been stuck in the 4.5km tunnel in Uttarakhand state since it collapsed on 12 November.<\/p>\n
The process of pulling them out, one at a time on wheeled stretchers through a pipe 90cm wide, would take a couple of hours, officials said.<\/p>\n
The evacuation pipe has to be pushed through and debris cleared before rescue workers can crawl through and begin getting the men out, they said.<\/p>\n
Dozens of rescue workers with ropes and ladders were lined up outside the tunnel and ambulances began arriving to take the 41 men to a hospital about 30km away.<\/p>\n
The tunnel is part of the $1.5 billion Char Dham highway, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most ambitious projects, aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through an 890km network of roads.<\/p>\n
Authorities have not said what caused the cave-in but the region is prone to landslides, earthquakes and floods.<\/p>\n
– Reuters<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Indian rescuers have drilled through rocks and debris to reach 41 workers trapped for 17 days in a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas, and were set to pull them out one by one to safety, officials said. The men, low-wage workers from India’s poorest states, have been stuck in the 4.5km tunnel in Uttarakhand state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8483,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8481\/revisions\/8483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}