Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Pushkar Singh Dhami will examine the operations on the ground on Sunday amid the continuing efforts to free the workers trapped in the Uttarkashi tunnel, a section of which collapsed earlier, the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) announced in a statement. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari will accompany the chief minister when he visits the tunnel site on Sunday.
“Along with the Chief Minister, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari is also arriving to take stock of the relief and rescue work,” the CMO added in its statement.
On Saturday, a former advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) took stock of the relief operations at the under-construction Silkyara Tunnel located on the Uttarkashi-Yamnotri road.
The local administration on Saturday informed that it would deploy a tree-cutting expert as part of the ongoing efforts to extricate 40 workers trapped inside the tunnel for seven days now.
A tree-cutting expert, Ashiq Hussain, was called by the Forest Department to the tunnel site, officials said on Saturday.
Officials added that they were trying to reach the workers through vertical drilling from the upper part of the tunnel.
Additionally, Chris Cooper, a specialist in microtunnelling, arrived at the Silkyara tunnel incident site on Saturday to supervise and monitor the rescue effort. Cooper is a chartered engineer with extensive experience completing major international civil engineering projects, including railways, mining projects, large caverns, metro tunnels, and dams.