Uttarakhand glacier burst: Inside a flooded tunnel, a hero, his team and an agonising 7 hours

DEHRADUN: For one brief moment after a cascade of silt and mud descended on the tunnel he had been working in and blocked its opening, Vijendra Kumar felt helpless. But the 50-year-old senior foreman had 11 other men to look out for. For three years, he had led the work on Tunnel Number 2 of

NTPC

’s

Tapovan

hydel project in

Uttarakhand

. This was not the time he would let them down.


On Sunday afternoon, a video of Vijendra emerging from the muddy tunnel, screaming ‘Balle Balle’ and dropping to the ground in happiness had gone viral. It has, so far, been the only successful rescue operation in the Uttarakhand flood — all 12 men were saved. But those seven hours were like “staring at death,” Vijendra told TOI on Monday.


Sometime between 9am and 10am, a flood had been triggered in the Dhauliganga river, which swept through everything in its path. When Vijendra and his men felt the ground shake, the

waters

were hurtling through the hydel project they were building. Within minutes, the water started flowing into the clogged tunnel. “Everyone else started panicking. I snapped back, I had to. I had to be calm,” Vijendra said.

It was a D-shaped horizontal tunnel, 350m long and 5m high. There was no way out. Some of his men were as young as 20. “Help will arrive, don’t lose hope,” he kept saying.

But by 11.30am, the water level had risen considerably. That was when another team member, excavator driver Rakesh Bhatt, asked everyone to sit on the roof of the excavator, took the wheel and whenever the water level inched upwards, he raised the excavator just a bit. The machine was 3m high and he had raised it 2m. Their heads were nearly touching the roof of the tunnel.

“The water was muddy and it was getting difficult to breathe. The younger ones started weeping. Everyone was drenched, shivering in fear and the cold,” Bhatt said.

But just as they had given up, the waters started receding. “It was around 11.45am-12 noon. We don’t know what happened, but the water started going down,” Vijendra said. And, then, he spotted iron rods jutting out of the damaged structure. “I thought we could hold on to those to move, maybe towards the opening.”

The men were not convinced. “So, I moved ahead first. Sceptical initially, they followed me,” Vijendra said. They reached as close to the mouth of the tunnel as possible, clambering precariously over the rods for support. At one spot, miraculously, Vijendra’s phone got hold of a network signal. A quick call to an NTPC official, Rakesh Dimiri, was followed by an anxious but short wait.

On the ground, ITBP deputy commandant Nitesh

Sharma

got to work with a 50-member team. “In over three hours, we only managed to dig a small passage into the tunnel, some 120m deep. I crawled into that with two of my men. We caught a glimpse of some of them, gasping for breath,” he said. Those who could climb up, did, and others tied it around their waist for the ITBP men to pull up. Seven gruelling hours later, the men had emerged, safe and unhurt. Sharma, who shot the video that went viral, added, “It was the only happy moment on the otherwise tragic day.”