According to rescue officials, the deceased was found trapped in a machine inside the collapsed section of the tunnel. One body has been recovered from the debris inside the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) Tunnel in Telangana’s Nagarkunool, where a collapse on February 22 trapped eight workers. “We found one dead body stuck in the machine, with only the hand visible. The rescue teams are currently cutting the machine to retrieve the stuck body,” said the unidentified official.
The rescue operation inside the partially collapsed tunnel entered its 16th day on Sunday. Earlier today, Cadaver dogs were roped in to assist in the rescue efforts and found human remains inside the tunnel as the rescue operation entered its 16th day. The Kerala police’s Belgian Malinois breed dogs are capable of detecting scent from a depth of up to 15 feet.
Robots to be deployed for rescue ops
Telangana’s irrigation minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Saturday directed the officials to take immediate steps to deploy robots for the rescue work inside the partially collapsed SLBC tunnel. Calling the incident a national disaster, he emphasised that the state government is utilizing the best global technology to overcome the challenges in the final stretch of the 14-kilometre-long tunnel.
Reddy also visited the tunnel site and reviewed the ongoing rescue operation with the officials of different organisations. Describing the tunnel collapse as a “national disaster”, Reddy had said: “The government is determined to continue the rescue operation though the conditions inside the tunnel, including low levels of oxygen, high seepage of water and the sturdy parts of TBM that got drowned in water and soil, posed challenges to the operation.”
Eight persons — engineers and labourers — have been trapped in the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) project tunnel since February 22 and experts from the NDRF, Indian Army, Navy and other agencies are making relentless efforts to pull them out to safety.
