An Australian tunnelling expert has told of his part in the dramatic rescue of 41 Indian workers who had been trapped in a collapsed tunnel for 17 days.
Arnold Dix, a Melbourne specialist in underground transportation and infrastructure, is being hailed after his efforts helped save workers stuck inside a blocked tunnel in the Himalayan mountains.
Dix told Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Wednesday morning that once he was asked to help he found himself “literally in a helicopter being whisked out like in a MASH movie up into the Himalayas” and “was confronted with something I’ve never seen before”.
The engineering professor, lawyer and president of the Geneva-based International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, was sent to the Silkyara-Barkot tunnel in the state of Uttarakhand, where a landslide had caused the entrance of a highway construction tunnel to collapse.
Authorities had so far managed to drill through 50 metres of debris with a vast drilling machine from the US, leaving only about 10 to 15 metres left of the blockage.
Over the 17 days, authorities and doctors had been funnelling oxygen, food, water and medicines through a small water pipe to the labourers.
But the operation came to a halt after the mechanical drill broke down. While the drill was being fixed, 200 rescuers were manually drilling and removing the rubble using a pulley system, authorities said, Dix included.
Describing the scene of the mountain when he first arrived, Dix told Sunrise it “had an avalanche with millions of tonnes of rock and a huge cavity inside”.
The task that lay ahead for the huge team of experts, who had come together from all over the world, was no easy feat, Dix told Channel Nine’s Today show.
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He described the gruelling process of having to dig “100 millimetres at a time” while balancing the risk of triggering another landslide.
But he said he had promised the families of the trapped workers that the “41 men are coming home safe”.
The workers were eventually pulled out through an escape pipe on Tuesday night after the last stretch of rubble was manually drilled by the specialist team.
“I’m just over the moon,” Dix told the Today show. “This is what real nice people do to help one another.”
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