U’khand disaster: Rescuers shift focus
Now focusing on drilling through hardened debris in tunnel Rising Dhauliganga triggers another scare
Rescue agencies began drilling through the debris in the Tapovan tunnel to establish contact with the over 30 people trapped inside after a flash flood, an operation which stalled briefly Thursday when the Dhauliganga river began swelling again.
The confirmed death toll in the Uttarakhand disaster rose to 35 with the recovery of another body in Gauchar and 169 people remain missing since Sunday, after an avalanche or a glacier break triggered a surge of water in the Alaknanda river system.
In an apparent change in strategy, the rescuers are now also focusing on drilling through the hardened debris in the choked tunnel in Chamoli district, rather than just shifting mounds of silt and sludge heaped there by the sudden flood.
The aim for now is to set up a "life-saving system", possibly to pump oxygen into the blocked tunnel.
The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and the Army are part of the multiagency rescue effort, which continues even as hopes of finding the trapped workers alive recede with each passing hour.
On Thursday afternoon, there was another scare when the water of the Dhauliganga - a tributary of the Alaknanda - began rising again.
Rescue workers at the Tapovan site scrambled to safety, pulling their heavy machinery to higher ground. A press briefing ended midway and the operation halted.
It resumed after 45 minutes with cautious officials saying they will send in only small teams to the rescue site for now.
The centre of the rescue operation remains the 1.5-km "head-race tunnel" -- a part of the 2.5-km long network of tunnels -- at the 480-MW Tapovan-Vishnugad hydel power project of the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). Rescuers began the drilling in the early hours of Thursday.
"A drilling operation was started by the rescue teams at 2 am to peep into the slushflushing tunnel that is about 12-13 metres below," Vivek Kumar Pandey, the spokesperson for the lead rescue agency, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), said in Delhi.
As the continuous flow of slush and silt remains a major obstacle between the rescuers and those trapped inside, a boring operation by a huge machine is being undertaken to see if this problem can be addressed in a different way and the teams can go further deep inside, he added.