Rescuers toil to reach trapped men, hope dims
JOSHIMATH: With flood waters receding slowly and the height of the slush in NTPC Limited’s tunnel in Tapovan shrinking, rescuers said on Wednesday they were making steady progress in reaching the 37 men trapped in the tunnel. For families of people believed to be buried in a barrage nearby, hope was dimming.
As the rescue operation mounted after Sunday’s flash flood in the town in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district entered the fourth day, several families gave up hope of reuniting with their missing kin and instead pleaded with rescuers to retrieve at least the bodies. The disaster has left at least 34 people dead, and the number of missing was 170 as of Wednesday night.
“Give me even a finger of my son and I’ll return to my village to cremate him,” a tearful Ram Daman Singh, father of welder Vijay Singh, feared to be buried in the barrage, begged army officers on Wednesday afternoon.
Like Vijay Singh, dozens of workers at NTPC’s hydroelectric project are believed to be buried several metres under debris in the barrage close to the entrance of a tunnel where multiple agencies have been working round-theclock for over 72 hours.
Difficult to retrieve bodies
On Tuesday, a rescue team used ropes to wade into the slush, but soon abandoned the effort.
Benudhar Nayak, commandant of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police’s First Batallion, who is overseeing the operations along with teams of the National Disaster Response Force and the Army, said there was no chance of recovering bodies from the barrage for the time being. “The slush in the barrage is over 20 metres deep since the plant’s construction work was ongoing... The rescuers will themselves sink. Even if they do enter the slush, they won’t be able to recover bodies,” he said.
The officer said that while the rescuers have spared no efforts to retrieve bodies, they’ll now have to wait for an “opportune time” to resume the effort. “Maybe when the slush hardens, we will attempt again.”
But when the slush hardens, the retrieval could be more difficult, said NTPC workers who survived the tragedy. “There was tons and tons of cement in the barrage. The flood brought it all down. Now, the slush is mixed with cement and it is getting watered as well. When it all dries up, the bodies will be amidst concrete, and not slush,” said Devendra Lal Khanila, a junior electrician and leader of the workers’ union.
While about four dozen workers were inside the network of tunnels when the flood hit Sunday, many more were in the barrage area. This barrage is also a point where workers washed away from another hydroelectric plant a few kilometres up the river are believed to be stuck
Tunnel work slow but steady
With retrieval of bodies from the barrage unlikely for now, rescuers focused on making inroads into the tunnel. Until Tuesday evening, Nayak said, rescuers had cleared slush up to 110 metres into the 240metre-long subsidiary tunnel. One batch of workers are believed to be trapped at a distance of around 100 metres from the point where the subsidiary tunnel meets the main tunnel.
On Wednesday, Nayak said, much of the work was undone with slush from inside the tunnel occupying the cleared area. “But now there is less water in the tunnel than before. So the ground is getting a bit harder, easing our operation... We hope that people inside are still alive,” said Nayak.
Ganga Singh, an ITBP constable, said another positive aspect was that the height of the slush has shrunk. “There are more air pockets inside the tunnel and more space to work now. Through the night, we worked with two earth movers inside, unlike earlier when only one would go in,” said Singh.
On Tuesday, rescuers made an abortive attempt to use camera-fitted drones to locate those trapped inside.
“The conditions inside are very hostile for survival, but we usually stay hopeful for six days even in these circumstances,” an army lieutenant colonel, requesting not to be named, said about the chances of survival of the trapped men.
Families losing hope
While families of those trapped in the tunnel understood that the rescue attempt was time-consuming and waited in accommodation provided by the local government, kin of workers believed to be buried in the barrage landed up at the site in large numbers on Wednesday. A helpdesk set up here on Tuesday evening to address their concerns wasn’t enough to keep them patient.
“My brother Jitendra Kumar was outside the tunnel when the flood hit. He made a video call to me at 10.25am. When he called again at 10.34am, I failed to take his call. My family has been constantly asking me if he is alive. How do I tell them that I may have to return without even his body. The officials here have ...asked me to return home, saying that it could take two-four months to find his body,” said Pawan Kumar, a man who arrived here from Doda in Jammu and Kashmir.
Others sounded more desperate. Mrityunjay Kumar from Patna said his brother, assistant engineer Manish Kumar, was married just two months ago. “Please deploy the army, the navy, anyone. At least give me my brother’s body,” he said in tears.
The kin of missing workers held a protest in Raini village on Wednesday accusing the authorities of not carrying out the rescue operations properly.