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An emergency response expert who led the rescue of Indian labourers trapped in a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas is looking forward to returning to his flower farm in the Yarra Ranges after celebrating with the workers on Tuesday night.
Arnold Dix worked alongside Indian rescuers to free the 41 workers who were trapped for 17 days after a landslide.
Dix, from Monbulk, told 3AW radio he cried as the men were reunited with their families – an outcome he said was “like a story” that at times no one thought would have a happy end.
Dix said he stepped back to watch the emotional final minutes of the weeks-long rescue away from journalists and politicians who had come to see the men walk free.
“It was for their country. These are their children that we’d brought home,” he said.
Dix is a lawyer and engineering professor who received many accolades for enhancing safety in tunnels over 30 years. He said people like him worked in the background to get clean water to cities and get trains running on time.
The rescued workers cheer after being freed.Credit: Uttarakhand State Department of Information and Public Relations via AP
But back home in Monbulk, he’s little known and a relatively unsuccessful flower farmer.
“Now people are gonna go, ‘hang on a minute, Albert does something else apart from being the least successful farmer up the road’,” he said.
None of the Indian men were seriously injured when a landslide caused a section of the 4.5-kilometre tunnel to collapse early in the morning of November 12. The rescue had been expected to be straightforward, but a series of setbacks led to the workers being trapped for more than two weeks.
About a dozen rescuers took turns digging through rocks and debris using hand-held tools after the machine they had been using broke down on Friday, a local government spokesperson said.
Arnold Dix (left) from Monbulk has helped rescue 41 trapped workers.
Dix said it had been a “bit of a Zen moment” when the experts acknowledged preventing another avalanche required them to work “softly and slowly”.
“I just felt like we could do it, I wasn’t sure how, but we were all just so committed to getting these men out,” he said.
“In the end, we took away all the big fancy machines. We pulled apart all the really super-powerful stuff that we had. And we said we’d use men with their bare hands. And we got them to scrape away the rocks 100 millimetres at a time to build the tunnel to get to the other side.”
Dix said that with the men’s families present, and cameras broadcasting the rescue to television screens across India, it felt as if 1.4 billion people were in one room celebrating together on Tuesday night.
“It was almost like a reaffirmation that good people could do good things at the time, you know, as the whole world’s completely nuts,” he said.
He said he wasn’t expecting a great deal of fanfare for his work, other than accepting invitations to attend a local temple and to be flown out of the Himalayas by helicopter.
“I just want to go home, actually,” he said. “The only thing that worries me is normally in Monbulk no one knows what I do. I just grow flowers like everyone else in Monbulk – probably least successfully than everybody else.”
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