SILKYARA TUNNEL: Indian rescuers began digging a vertical shaft Saturday to free 41 workers trapped inside a collapsed road tunnel for two weeks, after efforts through another route hit snags just meters from freeing the men.
In the latest setback in attempts to rescue the increasingly desperate workers, engineers driving a metal pipe horizontally through 57 meters (187 feet) of rock and concrete ran into metal rods and construction vehicles buried in the earth.
A giant earth-boring machine snapped just nine meters from breaking through.
Thick metal girders in the rubble are blocking the route, and using cutting tools to clear them is tricky from inside the confined pipe, only wide enough for a man to crawl through.
Ambulances are on standby and a field hospital has been prepared to receive the men, who have been trapped since a portion of the under-construction Silkyara tunnel in the northern state of Uttarakhand caved in on November 12.
Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh…