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The moment four National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel arrived on the other side of the rubble at the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand to rescue 41 labourers trapped inside, their hopes of a safe evacuation were kindled, team commander Manmohan said.
"As soon as we waved at them and announced that an NDRF team is here for their safe evacuation and they have no reason to worry, there was a loud cheer among the group," Manmohan, who was the first person of the NDRF team to crawl through the passage to the other end of the rubble, said on Tuesday.
The NDRF team was there for nearly two hours, he added.
"We told them we are from the NDRF and have come to evacuate you to safety. The entire country stands with you," Sachin Chaudhary from Rajasthan's Alwar told PTI while recounting his experience.
"We crawled through the 800-mm-diameter pipes to reach them. We had stretchers behind us. We had an oxygen cylinder and water bottles with us," he said.
Chaudhary said the NDRF team that went inside the under-construction road tunnel in Uttarkashi district, motivated the labourers who were trapped inside the structure for almost 17 days.
The NDRF personnel sent out the older ones among the labourers -- about 10-12 of them -- on wheeled stretchers through the passage, while the rest crawled through the steel chute wearing knee-pads and helmets.
"We had confidence in our training. We were sure that we will succeed in evacuating them and we did," Chaudhary said.
Besides Manmohan and Chaudhary, the two other members of the NDRF team were Pradeep Kumar and Vinod Rawat.
Rescue workers on Tuesday evening pulled out all the 41 workers who got trapped after a portion of the Silkyara tunnel, part of the Centre's ambitious Char Dham project, collapsed due to a landslide on November 12.