Powerful spiritual force aided Silkyara rescue, says Australian tunnelling expert
DEHRADUN: Arnold Dix was in Germany when the first call came. Then another, in Slovenia. The news was urgent – a tunnel collapse in Uttarakhand had left 41 workers stranded. Their survival depended on whether a narrow passage could be drilled through layers of hard rock and debris before time ran out. He didn’t hesitate. “I was asked to join the team working to rescue the trapped workers. Without a second thought, I boarded a flight to India,” he said.
He arrived in Uttarkashi on Nov 20, eight days after the collapse. By then, frustration had begun to seep into the operation. A nation watched as engineers, officials, and workers clawed at the earth, racing against time.
Dix, a tunnelling expert from Australia and president of International Tunnelling & Underground Space Association, was a man of engineering, precision, and numbers – he wasn’t built to believe in things he couldn’t measure. But standing at the mouth of that collapsed tunnel, surrounded by exhaustion & failure, he felt the unshakable presence of something heavier than rock. “I’m a rational man,” he told TOI, “But I am of the firm belief that a powerful spiritual force also played a crucial role in saving the 41 men.” The experience changed him profoundly.
As days went by without a substantial breakthrough, Dix knew he had to shift the way they worked. The white hard hat of “management people” came off. The yellow helmet of the workers came on. “With the blessing of Baba Baukhnag, whose temple was near the tunnel, I wore that yellow hat with conviction. We would save them,” he said.
For a moment, it wasn’t engineering that defined the rescue. It was belief.
The auger machine was their best chance. On Day 14, it failed. It wasn’t a slow breakdown. It was abrupt. A hard stop. The team deflated. The energy on-site sagged. He had seen this before – the point in a disaster where exhaustion sets in and hope begins to fray. “I changed my hat, kept their spirits high, and reminded them that we would bring those men to safety before Christmas.”
On his flight to India, somewhere above the Arabian Sea, he had been reading about Kali – goddess of time, doomsday, justice, and death. “The more I read, the more she made sense to me,” he wrote in his book ‘The Promise’, released last week. At the mouth of the tunnel, he thought about her again. “My first time in the tunnel was overwhelming. This was a much bigger mess than I could have possibly imagined,” he wrote.
On Nov 28, the last slab of rock was cleared. Leaders of the operation, including Dix, were hailed as heroes. But for him, the experience did not end at the tunnel’s mouth. It followed him across continents. He studies Sanskrit now. Has faith in things he once dismissed. Carries with him the yellow helmet – not as a souvenir, but as something else. A marker. A threshold. A reminder that sometimes, numbers aren’t enough.