They will resort to ‘miners in mousetraps’ to save the workers

The rescue operations to remove 41 workers trapped in a tunnel under construction for 16 days In northern India, “mousetrap miners” will be used, a questionable mining technique that will be resorted to after numerous breakdowns with machinery and initial rescue plans.

“The Manual technique will be used tonight with the help of Indian Army Engineers, Rat Miners and other technicians“, said Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain (retd.), member of the National Disaster Management Authority.

He the plan is to send a group of miners into the so far open holemore than 40 meters long and almost a meter wide, in order to manually dig the tunnel and take the debris out with carts.

A primitive technique of “mousetrap mining”, used for coal mining in some regions of India, Some organisms consider it dangerouswhich indicate the risk of sending people through small tunnels, in many cases child miners.

Rescue forces though They will employ three teams of six people each They will take turns inside the narrow tunnel through which, as expected, the workers will be pulled out one by one on special stretchers.

This horizontal excavation has always been the master plan of the expertsbut it has been stopped since last Thursday, at a depth of slightly more than 40 meters, when the auger used to drill it failed.

International tunneling expert Arnold Dix recently explained that it is no longer possible to continue horizontal drilling with machines and that it will only be possible by hand, when There are still more than 10 meters to the place where the trapped workers are.

At the same time, Two other alternative plans have been launched at the scene of the accident.

One of them is vertical tunnel drillingwith which they progressed 30 of the almost 90 meters that separate them from the workers.

With no certainty about the time it might take to successfully complete any of these plans, three other alternatives remain pending, and The authorities admit that they cannot determine the exact date of an effective rescue.

The the workers were captured in the early morning hours of November 12when part of a tunnel under construction collapsed in the town of Silkyara, in the northern state of Uttarakhand, causing a blanket of debris nearly 60 meters thick.

Workers They were given food, water and medicine, as well as oxygenthrough a narrow pipe that was already present before the accident.