Hyderabad:Every day is throwing up a new challenge to be met, and a problem to be solved, deep under the Nallamala hills of Nagarkurnool district where rescue workers, and officials have been battling unforgiving conditions inside the disaster-stricken SLBC tunnel inlet section for the past 19 days.These conditions include a combination of silt and large rocks piled up several metres high, water gushing in at the rate of around 3,000 to 5,000 litres a minute, hidden and broken parts of the tunnel boring machine that can cause serious injuries, and worst of all, not just enough air to breathe in the final 200 to 400 metres of the tunnel, but with each day, progress is being made in the search efforts to find seven more of the missing workers feared to be buried under a tunnel boring machine some 13 km inside the tunnel. While the work has not gotten the rescuers anywhere close to finding the tunnel workers missing since the February 22 incident, seven more of whom need to be found after the body of one of them, Gurpreet Singh was retrieved on last Sunday, rescuers have found that there are some ‘empty’ pockets between the three steel tiers of the tunnel boring machine. But what this might mean in terms of finding the missing seven workers and whether any took refuge in such spots, is highly uncertain, rescuers said.“We may be at a phase where work can really speed up from tomorrow,” special chief secretary, disaster management, Arvind Kumar said on Wednesday.This speeding up is expected to be aided by an autonomous sludge removing robot that will be put to work in the last 50 metres stretch of the tunnel — considered hazardous given the unstable conditions in that section. And joining the new machine will be a new 50-member strong team of stone cutters from the Vaddera community, a prospect that was never on the cards, indicating the need for fresh solutions to emerging problems to be solved inside the tunnel.The machine from Anvi Robotics, was taken inside the tunnel on Wednesday. Equipped with various sensors and cameras, the robot, which can also dig, is expected to reduce the need to have people working in the potentially dangerous section of the tunnel.“After the removal of the machine parts that made way for excavators to remove silt, we encountered a new problem, that of large and small boulders which cannot be transported on the conveyor belt along with the silt. From tomorrow, the stone cutters will join rescuers in the tunnel. Their job will be to break down the large rocks into small pieces so they can be taken on the conveyor belt along with the silt,” Arvind Kumar, said.On Wednesday, engineers repaired the air inlet vent till the last point of the tunnel ensuring a constant supply of fresh air. “Till today, just a few could work near the machine because the air was just not enough. From now, more people can work closer to the end section of the tunnel, and this will mean faster progress in the search. And to channel the water out of the work area, a 30 metre trench has been dug which should make digging in the drier silt faster. But the challenge is to cut through the machine’s different tiers through thick steel plates to reach deeper in the search,” Arvind Kumar said.
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