Since Sunday, 40 workers have been trapped in a highway tunnel they were working in in northern India that collapsed.

This led to the mobilization of emergency teams and lifeguards who worked with excavators to effect the rescue.

However, debris continues to fall as they try to clear the passage, so they prepare a giant steel pipe as an escape route.

“All 40 workers trapped in the tunnel are still alive,” he told the BBC AFP Karamveer Singh Bhandari, a senior commander of the National Disaster Response Force.

Emergency teams injected oxygen into the accident area and managed to bring food and water.

“Small packets of food are sent through a pipe that also transports oxygen inside,” he said AFP Durgesh Rathodi, head of rescue services in the state of Uttarakhand, in the Indian Himalayas, where the disaster occurred.

Excavators have removed about 20 meters of rubble, but workers are 40 meters away, he added.

“Due to the amount of debris in the tunnel, we are facing difficulties in the rescue operation,” Bhandari said.

Rescuers plan to use a heavy machine to lay a steel pipe about 90 centimeters wide, enough for trapped workers to pass through, the state highway and infrastructure company said.

The first contact with the workers took place through a message on a piece of paper, but then the rescuers managed to establish communication using radio equipment.

The tunnel is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Char Dam Road project, designed to improve connectivity to some of the country’s most popular Hindu shrines and regions near the Chinese border. (JO)