Hopes are excessive that in a couple of hours’ time the 41 staff who’ve been trapped in a tunnel for 13 days in north India will emerge to freedom and recent air.

The temper on the scene – the place heavy equipment and a greater than 200-strong rescue group have been toiling with out a break – was upbeat after a monumental and torturous operation.

An enormous drilling machine was on the final lap of the job, simply 9-10 tantalising metres away from the place the employees are trapped. Over the previous 13 days the machine has cleared about 60 metres of rubble.

Ambulances and docs at a makeshift hospital are on standby to obtain the exhausted staff, who grew to become trapped behind a wall of concrete particles and rubble when the roof of the tunnel they had been engaged on in Uttarakhand collapsed on 12 November.

The tunnel is a part of the prime minister Narendra Modi’s flagship challenge to attach some common Hindu websites within the nation and to enhance entry to strategic areas bordering China.

From the outset, the complicated and delicate rescue operation has been fraught with dangers and beset by delays. On Thursday morning, the drilling machine hit some iron mesh that it couldn’t penetrate, and welders had been referred to as in to take away it.

In the night the machine stopped drilling when it hit some crowbars, which needed to be eliminated with gasoline cutters. On Friday the machine needed to cease once more after encountering iron objects.

“All this time, the fear at the site has been that the drilling itself could cause vibrations that would trigger yet another chunk of the roof to collapse,” mentioned Mahmood Ahmad, an official with the National Highways Corporation.

At one stage, after repeated breakdowns of the drilling machine created a way of despondency, thought was given to attempting one other tack. “We decided to try drilling from all sides – drilling from the other end of the tunnel, from the sides and drilling vertically from the roof down to the workers,” mentioned Arnold Dix, a tunnelling skilled who had flown in from Australia to assist.

But this is able to have necessitated a large clearing of timber and the usage of heavy equipment, earth movers and vehicles to flatten the bottom and construct a street, paths and platforms to maneuver the drilling machine to the precise spot. By midweek it had been determined to proceed with the unique technique, drilling horizontally by means of the particles and hoping that no insurmountable object lay in the way in which.

When the drilling machine reaches the employees, the subsequent step shall be to weld the final two sections of a pipe to finish the creation of an escape passage. After this, the fragile means of pulling the employees up on stretchers fitted with wheels will start.

Abhishek Ruhela, a district Justice of the Peace, mentioned: “We are hoping they are strong enough to cope with being pulled up through a narrow pipe. The surface will be rough and sharp in some places. To avoid injuries, they will be strapped to the stretchers to limit their movements.

Initially, rescuers had predicted that the men would be out within a few days. But with one technical snag after another, officials stopped giving a timeframe, realising that it was impossible to predict what nasty surprises lay inside the tunnel.

Meanwhile, families waiting outside in the freezing cold began voicing their frustration. One man had lost a son at a construction site in Bombay earlier this year and now his second son was struck inside.

A rehearsal of the rescue on Friday morning, when one of the rescuers went into the passage on a stretcher and returned to the surface, went smoothly. Cheers broke out.

“Congratulations buddy. How did it feel? Comfortable? No problem towards the end?” requested members of the rescue group as they crowded round him.

Syed Ata Hasnain, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority, advised the NDTV information channel {that a} water pipe put in throughout the building had saved the employees from possible demise. It was by means of this pipe that small packets of dried meals and medicines had been pushed by means of.

“The packets had to be small because it would have been a total disaster if the pipe had got blocked with a large packet,” mentioned Hasnain, including that with out this pipe there would have been no likelihood of a rescue.

Another piece of fine fortune was that the employees’ energy cable didn’t snap throughout the collapse. Without it, the boys would have been in the dead of night.

The incontrovertible fact that it has been contained in the tunnel, though it’s bitingly chilly outdoors, has additionally helped. Doctors say the employees will have to be protected towards the sudden change in temperature.

When the rescue operation is over, Modi’s building initiatives within the area will come beneath scrutiny. Geologists and environmentalists have mentioned the federal government is enjoying with fireplace by constructing gigantic infrastructure initiatives within the fragile geology of the Himalayas. They say the rock formation, being younger in geological phrases, is free and fractured.

Safety measures throughout such initiatives have been criticised. Relatives mentioned among the staff had complained about bits of particles falling from the roof however nobody had paid any consideration. Tunnel consultants have mentioned that normally an escape tunnel is created in order that staff may be evacuated if wanted however this was not accomplished.

Uttarakhand’s chief minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, has promised a assessment of all tunnel initiatives within the state.