Nagpur: Wading through slush for more than a km inside a dark and gloomy passage, searching for bodies of 25 deceased in the suspected methane blast at National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) tunnel in Sikkim’s Namchi district on Monday, each breath counted for the 14 member rescue team from Nagpur’s Western Coalfields Limited (WCL). Even a minute’s delay would have left the rescuers dead.The rescuers needed to come out right before oxygen in their safety kit ran out. For three days they had only two hours in hand daily. One and half was spent in searching the bodies and carrying them on stretchers, and half an hour to scoot out on a vehicle parked inside the tunnel at a safer distance.The tunnel had turned into a gas chamber and bodies lay more than 2 km inside, and only rescue teams of Coal India Limited’s subsidiaries like WCL have the long-duration gas protection kits needed to walk into such a zone. Once activated, oxygen in the kit lasts for two hours., making it a race against time for the team.“We had to carry out the search and come out of the tunnel within the limited time,” WCL’s general manager safety Dinesh Bisen told TOI soon after coming out of the tunnel.“Our job is to rescue people, now we have to retrieve bodies. A challenging task, even emotionally, we would make it at last,” general manager Dinesh Bisen, who also headed the team, told TOI as he came out of the tunnel.“The oxygen is drawn through the cylinder and exhaled within the mask itself. The CO2 breathed out is absorbed in the device inside, separating the oxygen, which is breathed in again. However, with each cycle the machine gets heated up, with time, increasing the difficulty by each minute. And of course two hours was the final limit,” said Bisen.Giving a minute-to-minute account, Bisen said after other attempts failed, the WCL team was flown to Sikkim in a special aircraft from Nagpur. Initially it was expected that survivors may be there but the blast and the gas had not only killed the 22 persons but also three others who went to look for them soon after the blast.The team went over 1 km inside the tunnel in vehicles and walked for the rest of the distance. The place was full of gas and the fumes of a diesel vehicle would have triggered a massive blast if it went further inside.The area was full of slush, with bodies found covered under it. Some of the bodies were badly mutilated and it took courage for the team to put them on stretchers and walk further up till the vehicles, which took the mortal remains further up, he said.The kits, which are regularly used in training, were now put into practical use at Namchi. The team is trained to handle such situations. In 2023, WCL’s team was part of the rescue operations when the Silkyara tunnel collapsed, trapping 41 persons. Lately, it has taken part in handling fire incidents in private mines too., said the officer.Finally, “Mission Accomplished,” reached Western Coalfields Ltd headquarters in Nagpur, nearly 1,480 km away, after the 72-hour search operation. The successful recovery of all the victims brought closure to an arduous mission, but the mood remained sombre in the face of the tragedy.
