By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 3 Jan: Dehradun based environmental action and advocacy group SDC Foundation has released an extensive media monitoring brief on the recent tunnel collapse in Silkyara in district Uttarkashi. The document is a compilation of collected and archived news clippings for the entire duration of the Silkyara disaster. The 226 page document is a summary of key news items that were published in various national and state wide print media.
The brief reminds that a portion of the under construction Silkyara Bend–Barkot tunnel, intended to link National Highway 134 in Uttarkashi, had collapsed on 12 November last year, at around 5:30 a.m. and as a result, 41 personnel were trapped inside the tunnel. The SDC report adds that numerous government agencies from the Centre and State, including the National Disaster Response Force, the State Disaster Response Force, the Uttarkashi district authorities, Uttarakhand Police, engineers from the Indian Army and Project Shivalik of the Border Roads Organisation, the Indian Air Force and many others undertook the rescue efforts that were initiated right away.
The report points out that due to the fact that the initial rescue attempts proved difficult because of the types of debris generated by the collapse, the government had to eventually bring in ‘rat-hole miners’ to dig and clear the last few metres of the blockage to reach out to the trapped workers. The rat miners were able to deploy manual mining methods and extend an access pipe to the trapped workers.
Commenting on the document, Anoop Nautiyal, the founder of SDC Foundation, said that as an environmental action and advocacy group SDC believes in the power of archiving and documenting disasters and climate centric changes in Uttarakhand. SDC has regularly been engaging in extensive archiving of media updates, identifying trends and finally communicating its findings through an array of detailed summaries and reports in Uttarakhand. He added that the SDC Foundation has followed the tunnel collapse in Silkyara in the same spirit. In the process, SDC has documented key news items relating to the tunnel collapse. These were sorted and classified based on broad categories, and have now been digitised for public access.
Nautiyal expressed the hope that the document can prove to be a useful tool for information, research, advocacy, or for reference to various stakeholders such as government officials at the centre and in the state, development practitioners, researchers, social workers, civil society organisations as well as the media groups.
