A team of rat miners, who had rescued the construction workers trapped in the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel in Uttarakhand in 2023, has joined the rescue operation to save the eight workers trapped inside a collapsed portion of Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) in Telengana’s Nagarkurnool district.
The 44-km-long tunnel behind the Srisailam dam collapsed on Saturday morning when some workers were inside repairing a leak. While most of them managed to escape, eight got trapped and have been out of contact since Saturday.
According to Telangana Minister Jupally Krishna Rao, rescuing the trapped individuals would take at least three to four days, as the accident site is filled with muck and debris, making it a daunting task for the rescuers.
Who are the rat miners?
The term ‘rat hole’ refers to the narrow pits dug into the ground, typically large enough for one person to fit and extract coal. Once the pits are dug, miners descend using ropes or bamboo ladders to reach the bottom of the tiny holes. The coal is then extracted manually using tools like pickaxes, shovels, and baskets. According to Business Standard, rat miners, as they are often called, use the side-cutting technique, in which they dig narrow tunnels on hill slopes through which miners go inside to reach the coal seam. This technique came in handy while manually digging the last 15 metres of the collapsed tunnel at Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel to create the evacuation passage.
What happened in Uttarakhand in 2023?
On November 12, 2023, a section of the Silkyara Bend–Barkot tunnel, planned to connect National Highway 134 in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, caved in while under construction. As per the details, 41 workers got trapped inside the tunnel.
Though the initial attempts at a rescue were complicated because of the kinds of debris created in the collapse, the government brought in ‘rat-hole’ miners who were able to use manual mining methods to get an access pipe to the trapped workers. On November 28, the rat-hole miners broke through the remaining length of debris and pushed a pipe to the trapped workers manually. Later, on the same day, it was confirmed by the Government of Uttarakhand that all 41 workers had been successfully rescued.
