Rescuers in northern India battled for a second day to protect 40 workers stuck in pain underground after the road tunnel they were building collapsed, leading to bringing down heaps of debris. Teams utilising heavy excavators have been doing their job relentlessly since the collapse early Sunday morning to clear heaps of concrete and earth, but with more destructive pieces falling as workers attempted to clean a passage, a very huge steel pipe was being prepared as an escape route.
“All the 40 workers stuck inside the tunnel are secured currently,” Mr Karamveer Singh Bhandari, a senior commander in the National Disaster Response Force, told AFP from the view in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand on Monday. “We provided to them water and food.” Oxygen was being pumped into the blocked portion of the tunnel, with food being provided in sufficient through a water pipe.