Silt hampers Telangana tunnel rescue op

As eight persons got trapped around 14 km inside the tunnel of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal project after part of its roof collapsed on Saturday, a rescue team made headway on Sunday and reached the spot where a tunnel boring machine was working during the incident.

However, silt posed a challenge to move further to reach the spot where the people were believed to have been trapped, Nagarkurnool District Collector B Santhosh said. The Collector, who is supervising the rescue operation, said four NDRF teams — one from Hyderabad and three from Vijayawada — comprising 138 members, including 24 Army men, and members of the infra firm, were engaged in the rescue operations.

The rescuers have reached the point where the tunnel boring machine is there. As there is silt after that point, the NDRF team is making plans to go forward. Oxygen and power supply has been made available in the tunnel and dewatering and de-silting operations are also underway. “As of now, we don’t have communication with them (those trapped). The rescuers will go inside and see and then we will be able to tell,” he said, adding, “there is water logging 2 km just before the 13.5 km point. It is a challenging task to reach the last point . Additional motors have been used to speed up the dewatering process,” he said. The team after reaching 13.5 km called those trapped, but did not get any reply from them, he said. After this point, there is still a 200-meter patch and it is only after reaching near them their condition would be known, he added.