Australian tunnel expert revealed as mastermind behind miracle rescue of 41 Indian miners who were trapped underground for 17 days – as full details of claustrophobic escape emerge

An Australian tunnel expert has been hailed as an international hero after leading the miraculous rescue of dozens of workers trapped underground for 17 days.

Professor Arnold Dix traveled from Melbourne to lead the lengthy rescue operations in Uttarkashi in northern India after a road tunnel under construction collapsed earlier this month.

All 41 workers were safely rescued from the rubble on Wednesday and greeted by rescuers and their relieved families, sparking jubilant scenes broadcast around the world.

Forty-one ambulances were kept ready till nightfall to await the workers, who were given a ‘green corridor’ to urgently reach medical facilities in Chinyalisaur.

Despite the enormous success of Professor Dix and his team of rescuers, including so-called ‘rat miners’ who probed the earth with their bare hands, he was terrified that not everyone would be able to get out alive.

“You start to know that everyone is alive and you know that if you make one wrong move, that changes,” Dix told Australian broadcasters.

“You have a mountain where the center has fallen away and more could come at any moment and we knew everything was unstable so we had sophisticated systems in place to measure what was going on.

‘We could see the rock moving. An earthquake could have set the whole thing in motion and it would have been game over.”

Dix said he and his team managed to reach the men, who were trapped nearly 200 feet below the surface, using a thin pipe through which they were carried 4 inches at a time, so as not to disturb the surrounding rocks.

Dix is ​​not just an engineering specialist.

He is also a lawyer and has worked at major law firms including White and Case and DLA Piper.

He is also president of the International Tunneling and Underground Space Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the safe use of underground areas.

In 2011 he received the Alan Neyland Australasian Tunneling Society Award for Excellence in Tunneling, described as the ‘highest award for tunneling professionals in Australia’.

Previous hopes of reaching the trapped workers were dashed by falling debris and the breakdown of several drilling machines.

A giant drill broke when it struck metal beams and construction vehicles buried in the rubble, and several high-powered drills also failed.

Rescuers then turned on a superheated plasma cutter to cut through metal bars that repeatedly hampered progress, before miners had to manually move huge amounts of earth and make a hole for their colleagues to push the steel rescue pipe through.

There were scenes of cheering as the first worker reached the surface, with handshakes, pats on the back and smiles going around as the group celebrated.

It was not an easy victory, with skilled miners and military engineers falling back on banned practices and working by hand after rock drills and excavators failed.

Dozens of emergency vehicles were photographed around the site of the tunnel collapse today as onlookers eagerly awaited news of the rescue mission.

Teams of doctors were joined by local villagers and even a man with garlands to welcome the first survivors as they emerged.

By evening, the tunnel was illuminated by teams preparing to treat the construction workers for any health problems after being trapped underground for more than two weeks.

It was expected to take between five and seven minutes to get each worker through the tunnel to safety after the first one had successfully pulled through – almost three and a half hours in total.

The process added time for each worker to adjust to the surface temperature, around 14 degrees Celsius, NDTV reported.

Video footage shared this afternoon showed a group of men wearing helmets and safety gear standing around the new pipe, some pulling on a rope.

The camera panned to show a team involved in the mission, a large partnership of local and national disaster response forces, police and military engineers.

The group labored to pull the first man through the tunnel with a toolbox on one of the custom-made stretchers, helping him to his feet after 17 long days trapped in the rubble.

He emerged from the hole and stood to shake hands with his rescuers before someone entered the tunnel to check if anything was left behind.

The sense of relief was palpable after more than two weeks of hopeless attempts to cut nearly 200 feet through the rubble with American-made excavators and large drills.

Tools broke and rescue teams were forced to resort to banned mining practices in “rat holes” to break down the rubble that trapped the men in an unfinished tunnel.

The 41 workers had been working on the Barkot Tunnel in northern India on November 12 when a boulder sealed their way out.

The collapsed tunnel, located in the Uttarkashi district of the Indian Himalayas, is part of an ambitious project to improve connectivity to renowned pilgrimage sites in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, home to some of the holiest sites for Hindus.

The tunnel, a key part of the highway plan, is intended to provide year-round access to Yamunotri – a major Hindu pilgrimage site – by shortening the travel distance between Uttarkashi and Yamunotri town by 25 kilometers and providing much-needed cover from the elements offer.

The project was given the green light by the federal government in 2018, although some environmental experts criticized the potential damage the project could cause to the region’s fragile ecology.

“We are grateful to God and the rescuers who worked hard to save them,” Naiyer Ahmad, whose younger brother Sabah Ahmad is among the trapped workers and who has been camping at the site for more than two weeks, told AFP.

Sudhansu Shah, who had also been camping since shortly after the tunnel collapse on November 12, waiting for his younger brother Sonu Shah, said family members began celebrating. “We’re really hopeful and happy,” he said.