Kerala Police Cadaver dogs arrive in Telangana to join tunnel collapse rescue ops

Cadaver dogs of Kerala police on Thursday arrived in Telangana's Nagarkurnool to join the rescue operation at the partially collapsed SLBC tunnel in which eight persons remain trapped since February 22.

The dogs arrived by air and their handlers went inside the tunnel along with officials.

A plan will be prepared on how and where to take the dogs to look for human presence and the canines would be taken inside the tunnel on Friday morning, an official release of Telangana government said.

Cadaver dogs are specially trained to locate missing humans and human bodies. The canines and the officers handling them left for Hyderabad on Thursday morning, a Kerala government statement said in Thiruvananthapuram.

The dogs were sent for the rescue operation following a request by the State Disaster Management Authority whose help in the matter was sought by the National Disaster Management Authority, the statement said.

The rescue personnel had earlier used the services of a sniffer dog of the NDRF inside the tunnel for selecting the area to be taken up for digging to identify any human presence.

The Telangana government release said Col Kirti Pratap Singh, a senior official of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) visited the tunnel site on Thursday.

The state government's Special Chief Secretary (Disaster Management) Arvind Kumar briefed Singh about the ongoing rescue operation.

The release said the 150 metre-long Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) was completely destroyed in the accident at 13.650 km inside the tunnel after stones and debris fell on it. Soil, water and stones got deposited at the place.

The eight persons are suspected to have got trapped there.

Efforts are being made to locate the trapped men by cutting down the huge TBM.

The release further said the conveyor belt at the tunnel has been made operational and the rescue operation would gain speed after soil can be sent out using the belt.

The conveyor belt got damaged after the accident.

The rescue officials have already carried out digging for human presence at the locations suggested by the scientists of National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) in Hyderabad but it has not yielded results so far.

The scientists deployed a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPA) to identify any ''anomalies'' inside the tunnel.

However, water and slush inside the tunnel posed a challenge to the rescue personnel.

Eight persons -- engineers and labourers -- have been trapped in the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) project tunnel since February 22 and experts from the NDRF, Indian Army, Navy and other agencies are making relentless efforts to pull them out to safety. Meanwhile, BRS Working President K T Rama Rao alleged that the Congress government in the state ignored two reports that warned of the dangers of the tunnel site and demanded a judicial inquiry into the matter.

He claimed in a statement that Jaiprakash Associates Limited, the tunnel contract firm, had conducted a survey ''in collaboration with Amberg Tech AG in 2020 to assess the tunnel site''.

''The Tunnel Seismic Prediction (TSP) survey conducted by Amberg Tech AG in 2022 had already predicted and warned about the accident well in advance. The report explicitly identified a fault zone between 13.88 km and 13.91 km of the tunnel, highlighting the presence of weak rock formations and severe water leakages,'' Rama Rao said.

He also said that the recent accident occurred precisely in the fault zone mentioned in the report.

Rama Rao further claimed that the government was also in possession of another report conducted in 2022 by a former Director General of the Geological Survey of India and another geologist, which indicated that the tunnel construction began without properly assessing the surface conditions.

Despite being fully aware of these reports, the Congress dispensation deliberately concealed the warnings and continued operations, endangering workers' lives, Rama Rao alleged.

He demanded that the government release these two reports to the public and initiate an independent judicial inquiry under a sitting High Court judge.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)