All Those Rat-Hole Miners Who Made The Uttarkashi Evacuation Possible (image: twitter.com/kaankit)
After a prolonged ordeal of seventeen days, 41 workers trapped inside Uttarkashi’s Silkyara tunnel collapse site were finally rescued. The last leap of operation was carried by a team of rate-hole mining experts using their hand-held tools. They were undertaking manual drilling since Monday.
Since hearing news about the collapse, various agencies, machines, experts and resources were tirelessly engaged with the task of rescue operation. Several plans involving horizontal and vertical drilling were undertaken, and all these techniques made advances but failed to reach its successful conclusion. Though the auger drill method or horizontal drilling was incorporated in the process, due to metal obstructions the machine broke down and turned to be unserviceable. It was then, the dangerous and risky rat-hole mining method was used and became a miracle in the end.
The rat-hole miners manually removed the rubble to clear the last few metres of the tunnel site to reach the workers. Dozens of rat-hole miners engaged in this operation to remove the debris from the remaining 12 metres. Among them, Munna Qureshi, a 29-year-old rat miner, is called as the hero of the rescue misssion since he was the first rat miner to remove the last rock to access the workers. Monu Kumar, Wakeel Khan, Parsadi Lodhi, Feroz, and Vipin Rajout were the other involved in this heroic operation on Tuesday night. Majority of the rat-hole miners employed at the tunnel were from Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Hindustan Times reports.
Netizens are all out in praises for rat-hole miners. A user named @kaankit wrote on X: “The real heroes of this rescue operation are these brave rat-hole mining teams coming from very ordinary backgrounds.”
इस बचाव अभियान के असली नायक ,बेहद साधारण पृष्ठभूमि से आने वाले ये हैं rat- hole mining करने वाली बहादुर टीम।
इन्होंने मैन्युअल रूप से मलबे के ढेर के अंदर पाइप में लेट कर ड्रिल किया। सबसे खतरनाक परिस्थितियों में इस टीम ने सबसे मुश्किल काम को अंजाम दिया।
हम उम्मीद और करते हैं… pic.twitter.com/IfuoDVfzfT
— Ankit Kumar Avasthi (@kaankit) November 29, 2023
Rat-hole mining, also known as “box cutting”, is a method of manual coal extraction which involve digging narrow, vertical pits into the ground, typically just large enough for one person to fit into. These pits are called “rat holes” and it can be up to 100 meters deep and advance horizontally. Miners go down to these pits using ropes and bamboo ladders and take out coal using hand-held tools. Since these process is extremely dangerous and hazardous, rat-hole mining was declared illegal in many countries. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) of India banned the rat-hole mining in 2014, though it carried illegally in some areas.
