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.
