On the day of Deepavali, when 41 workers got trapped inside the Silkyara-Barkot tunnel, no one imagined that evacuation would turn out to be a long-drawn and challenging exercise spanning 17 days.
I had been assigned to go to Rajasthan on November 15 to cover the Assembly elections. My colleague, Aroon Deep, rushed to Silkyara where the workers had already spent over 72 hours inside the tunnel. He spent five days at the site covering the efforts of the various agencies. When a personal emergency brought Aroon back to Delhi, I was asked to go to Uttarakhand on November 22. That morning, the air was thick with anticipation as an American auger machine had penetrated up to over 40 metres into the debris. Since there had been progress, I expected to return to Delhi the next day. But by evening, the machine got stuck in the debris. It became clear that I would have to spend more time in the mountains.
The first problem was accommodation. The mountain was teeming with people and all the hotels had been booked by bureaucrats, government officials, members of the rescue team, and journalists. An old journalist friend shared the contact of a villager who had a room available in his double-storey house, barely 200 m from the tunnel. I took the offer happily only to realise when I walked in that it had three windows without panes. It was 3°C at night.
The next day, emotions ran high. The rescue teams had declared that the workers would be out soon. However, the smiling faces soon turned crestfallen as the machine, firmly wedged inside the debris, could not be dislodged.
For reporters, the challenge was to provide constant updates, especially when nothing happened for hours sometimes. And when details were provided, they had to be fact-checked, simplified and reported. We had to run from the tunnel site to a corner of the mountain to send updates as Internet was patchy in the hills. There was no Internet in my room either.
The other challenge was food. Most restaurants were shut since the Char Dham Yatra had concluded, so we mostly survived on Maggi and biscuits. Some NGOs served hot food but this either got polished off quickly or turned too cold to eat by the time we got to it. But people are always kind and one restaurant owner, Deepender Rawat, immediately opened his outlet seeing the rush of people in Silkyara.
The family members of the workers were naturally anxious and kept waiting outside the tunnel. While we print reporters sometimes mocked TV reporters for thrusting mics into the face of anyone emerging from the tunnel, whether an electrician or cook, we also felt sorry for them. The 24X7 news cycle is so punishing that the reporters had no time to wash their clothes or eat. One day, I heard a female reporter asking her brother to come to Silkyara from Delhi with some clothes as she had nothing left to wear. The TV journalists also did not wear caps though they were shivering; they reasoned that they had to look presentable on camera.
When vertical drilling began from the top of the mountain, there was cautious hope once again. Later, a senior bureaucrat called a press conference at the tunnel and informed us that the rescue would take some time as rat-hole miners had been called to manually dig through the debris. The families of the workers had tears in their eyes.
I decided to return to Delhi for a day. No one expected the miners to do wonders. But soon after reaching Delhi, I was told that progress had been steady, and the operation was in its final leg. I left again for Silkyara, typing stories on my phone throughout my journey.
Cheers erupted when the workers came out. It was 2 a.m. when our day ended, but no journalist was tired. Reporting on tragedies can often be draining and depressing, but this time we were thrilled that a long and difficult assignment had ended on a happy note and that the workers and their families were finally united.
