It has been 17 days fuelled by anxiety with bursts of hope and largely courage on part of the 41 workers, who got trapped inside the collapsed section of the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi on November 12, the morning of Diwali. More than 400 hours later, their families’ prayers answered, all have been rescued while the nation is tipping their hat to the relentlessness of the rescue teams.
Back in 2006, it took 50 hours for five-year-old Prince to be rescued from deep inside a borewell — an incident that captured the whole nation. And most recently, in 2018, it was the daring Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand that became a global event.
From ‘Operation Raniganj’ that inspired an Akshay Kumar movie to the Thai cave rescue that has now inspired documentaries, television series and movies, to the rescue of Prince that became a pop culture phenomenon – the 17-day mission in Uttarkashi is the latest on the list of mega feats.
Here are other such rescue missions and the timeline in which they were completed:
2006 Prince borewell rescue, 50 hours
The visuals of a five-year-old boy wrapped in a white sheet, being brought out of a 60-foot borewell at Haryana’s Kurukshetra district will always remain fresh in people’s memory. In July 2006, Prince fell into the borewell in Haldheri village and hogged the headlines for the next 50 hours as the nation waited with bated breath as the army came to his rescue. Another empty borewell of the same depth was found nearby and, eventually, iron pipes with a diameter of three feet were used to connect the two borewells following which the child was pulled out safely.
2002 Quecreek miners’ rescue, 77 hours
On July 24, 2002, less than a year after the horrific September 11 terror attacks, people in the US found themselves hooked to the TV watching nine miners from Quecreek Mining Inc in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, trapped hundreds of feet below ground, their oxygen supply dwindling as the water rose around them. A lot of struggle and 77 hours later, on July 28, the rescue team successfully evacuated the trapped miners one-by-one in a 22-inch wide cage and wrote the script for another remarkable feat of underground rescue. The miners were trapped in a four-foot chamber 240 feet below the surface after breaching a wall separating their mine from an older, flooded shaft.
1989 ‘Operation Raniganj’, 4 days
Another prominent rescue mission, ‘Operation Raniganj’ has recently been adapted into a movie, Mission Raniganj: The Great Bharat Rescue, starring actor Askshay Kumar. It is the story of how 65 workers trapped in the Mahabir Colliery coal mine were rescued due to the ingenuity and leadership of Coal India Ltd mining engineer Jaswant Gill in 1989. A total of 232 miners were at work inside the coal mine when it got flooded due to a sudden influx of water on November 13, 1989. While 161 miners were rescued immediately, 65 workers got stuck inside. Six labourers were killed in the accident.
Gill helmed one of the multiple rescue teams launched to save the trapped miners. The engineer came up with the innovative idea of fabricating a steel capsule about 7 feet in height and 22 inches in diameter and creating a new borehole to lower the capsule into the mine and taking out the miners, one by one. The steel capsule eventually helped rescuers bring out the workers.
Gill, who also went into the capsule to rescue the miners, was honoured with the highest civilian bravery award ‘Sarvottam Jeevan Raksha Padak’ by the then President R Venkataraman in 1991.
2018 Thai cave rescue, 18 days
Arguably the ‘most talked about’ rescue mission in recent years, the story of a Thai youth soccer team and their coach trapped in the Tham Luang Cave, prompting a global rescue effort, gripped the world.
On June 23, 2018, 12 members of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach were exploring the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex in northern Thailand when a rainy season downpour flooded the tunnels, trapping all of them. As water levels inside the cave continued to rise, the boys and their coach were evacuated successfully on July 10 — more than two weeks after they were trapped — from the cave one by one while sedated with the ketamine drug.
After eight days of frantic search, two British divers located the boys — aged between 11 and 16 — and the coach alive. The rescue mission reportedly involved more than 10,000 people, including 90 divers from different countries. Former Thai Navy SEAL Saman Kunan was the only casualty during the rescue operation.
Numerous books, documentaries, movies — including The Rescue, Thirteen Lives and Against The Elements — have been made retelling the story of one of the world’s most complex and jaw-dropping rescue missions.
2010 Chilean miners’ rescue, 69 days
Another harrowing rescue mission that riveted the whole world was the Chile mine rescue of 33 workers following the collapse of San Jose gold and copper mine on August 5, 2010. On October 13, 69 days later, the globally televised rescue saw 33 miners escaping the tunnel, one-by-one, via a capsule painted in the colours of Chile’s national flag.
After the collapse, the 33 men — ranging in age from 19 to 63 — moved to an underground emergency shelter area with the limited amount of food and water supply available. They were not able to communicate with emergency officials. On August 22, rescuers were able to drill a small hole from the surface down to the miners — trapped 2,000 feet below the surface. Following which the men sent up a note that translated in English to, “We are fine in the shelter, the 33 of us.” This opened up communication and rescuers were able to send down food, water and medicine.
(With PTI inputs)
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