Rescuers have been battling with a pile of silt over three-metre high and waterlogging to reach the eight men, including two engineers, trapped inside the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) near Domalapenta in the Nagarkurnool district of Telangana since yesterday.

Navy teams will also join the rescue mission arriving at Srisailam by midnight. The rescue team that reached up to 50 metres from the accident site returned after a six-hour-long operation. The rescuers called out the names of those trapped but received no response.

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The rescue team inched inside the tunnel up to 13.5 km. Videos and photographs of the tunnel where the tunnel boring machine was at work showed waterlogging and muck. The silt posed the greatest problem for the rescuers. After two days, the situation looked grim for those trapped inside, said an official at the site but added that “if there are any air pockets people may survive”.

The rescue personnel were using drones to guide them and identify potential danger as well and efforts were on to dewater the tunnel by engaging more pumps.

A 300-member strong rescue team consisting of personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, Indian Army’s Engineer Task Force, Singareni Collieries, and State Disaster Response were engaged to bring out the trapped men. The team reached up to 10 km inside the tunnel with the help of the train that ferries workers and excavated materials. Then they traversed on foot. The rescue team reached about 50 meters from the spot of the mishap but piled up muck and debris made it impossible to proceed further.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi spoke to chief minister A Revanth Reddy on phone about the mishap. In a conversation that lasted about 20 minutes, Reddy updated him on the rescue effort. Telangana governor Jishnu Dev Varma spoke with the Nagarkurnool collector B Santosh and inquired about the ongoing rescue operations.

State Irrigation Minister Uttam Kumar Reddy said the SLBC Project was conceived and sanctioned 35 years ago and work started 30 years ago. He said only 9 km of the 44 km tunnel remained to be completed. It would supply 30 tmc of irrigation water to the 4 lakh acres of fluoride affected and tribal populated areas of Nalgonda district. Reddy said they will recover from this setback and complete the project.

However, BRS handles on the ‘X’ posted an old video clip of former chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao speaking in the Assembly about the difficulty posed by the design of the SLBC tunnel. The Congress blamed the BRS for not completing the project in their ten-year reign. State Tourism Minister Jupally Krishna Rao, who is camping at the site, said, “ This was neither due to human error nor because of government negligence. There was loose rock formation due to which water and silt filled up the tunnel to almost 12-13 feet… This is a testing time. At this time Opposition parties BJP and BRS are trying to allege that this was due to the government’s negligence. This is wrong. In Kaleshwaram it was the government’s failure but this is because of nature.”