In a breakthrough in the tunnel collapse rescue operation in Telangana that has been going on for a week, the whereabouts of four of the total eight persons trapped has been located, state Excise Minister Jupally Krishna Rao said on Saturday.
Krishna Rao, who attended a meeting with officials involved in the rescue operation along with Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy, said there was lot of progress during the last couple of days.
"In my view, the whereabouts of four persons have been located through radar," he told reporters at the tunnel. He expressed hope they would be extricated by Sunday evening.
The other four appear to have been stuck beneath the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), he said.
Asked about the condition of the four whose whereabouts have been found, the minister recalled he had said on the first day itself that the chances of survival are remote.
The 450 ft tall TBM was being cut, he said.
The personnel of about 11 agencies are involved in the operation.
Rescue teams engaged in extricating the eight trapped workers under a partially collapsed tunnel of the SLBC here are cutting down a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) to make way to reach the stranded persons, officials said on Saturday The rescue efforts are on in full swing, a week after the engineers and labourers were trapped under the collapsed roof of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) tunnel.
Teams comprising personnel from NDRF, Army, state-run miner Singareni Collieries, rat miners and other agencies are working continuously, Nagarkurnool Superintendent of Police Vaibhav Gaikwad said.
"The rescue operation is going on... (Saturday) morning a team went inside (the tunnel)... The process of dewatering, removing debris is also going on simultaneously", the SP told reporters.
The parts of TBM are also being cut to clear the path ahead, he added.
"Whatever obstacles are coming in between (to reach the spot where they can search for trapped persons), we have to remove them." According to an official, the damaged part of the conveyor belt in the tunnel was expected to be repaired on Saturday.
Meanwhile, scientists from the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and detected some "anomalies" inside the tunnel.
However, it is unclear what these anomalies represent, given the challenging conditions inside the tunnel, including mud and saturated water bodies, official sources said.
Rescue personnel need to examine these "anomalies" further to identify them, they added.
Eight persons, working on the SLBC tunnel project, were trapped after a portion of the tunnel collapsed on February 22.
A team of over 500 skilled personnel from the Army, Navy, Singareni Collieries and other agencies were involved in the rescue ops over the past few days.
The trapped persons have been identified as Manoj Kumar (UP), Sri Niwas (UP), Sunny Singh (J&K), Gurpreet Singh (Punjab) and Sandeep Sahu, Jegta Xess, Santosh Sahu and Anuj Sahu, all from Jharkhand.
Of the eight, two are engineers, two are operators and the remaining four are labourers from Jharkhand.
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