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[00:00:00]

We're going to head to India now because the military there say it's flown in specialized equipment as part of the stepped-up efforts to free 41 construction workers from a collapsed road tunnel. An attempt to rescue them from the collapsed tunnel has been delayed by at least another four days. After the machine that was being used to drill through the rubble broke down. The workers have been stuck inside for two weeks or so now. Let's get to our South Asia correspondent, Samira Hussein. Samira, what's happening?

[00:00:33]

Well, you can see that there's a lot of construction work that's happening behind me, a lot of activity rather. Now, the issue right now is that the cars, rather... Sorry, I was distracted by that car. There's a lot of debris that still remains inside the tunnel. There's about 8-10 meters that divides where the rescue operators are and where the trapped individuals are in the tunnel. However, before any of the digging can resume, they have to take out this drilling machine that is completely broken down. And in order to do that, they have to break it into several different pieces to pull it out. Once that happens, officials say that they're actually going to go in and manually dig out the remaining 8-10 meters of debris.

[00:01:25]

Just to remind us, how did this happen? How did the collapse happen originally? What was going on and when was it?

[00:01:32]

Right, so take a look behind me. You can see the mouth of the tunnel, and then you can see that it's being carved inside a mountainside. They were building a roadway going through this mountainside, and there was a nearby landslide, and that landslide collapsed onto the partially-built tunnel, and it crushed people inside. Now, what makes this rescue operation so challenging is that not only are they dealing with various debris, but they're also contending with broken construction materials that have been caught in with all of the debris. And that's why so many of the machines end up breaking down because they get caught on pieces of metal.

[00:02:12]

And what's the latest on the men, the workers trapped themselves, and of course, the families waiting.

[00:02:19]

Right. The workers inside are being provided with regular meals, cooked foods, dahl, roti, vegetables, fresh fruit. They're also being provided with walkie talkie, so they can speak to those family members that have come here to be near where they are for if and when they are rescued. And so the family members can actually go inside to the Martha to tunnel and speak to their relatives. And that really does quite a bit for both those that are on the outside and those on the inside. You can imagine that if you have a loved one that is trapped now for 15 days and it looks like it's going to be several days longer, there's quite a lot of anxiety. And so at least to be able to speak with them does give some people some level of comfort.