The Human Spirit is good

Faced with dire circumstances, people resort to hard and dirty work to do good.O

On or around November 11th a tunnel collapsed in the Himalayas. 41 Indian workers were trapped behind fallen mountain in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. This was bad.

On Friday, November 24th a tunneling machine which had been making slow but steady progress failed. This is not so good.

Heavy machinery sits outside the tunnel after the tunnel machine failed (in India's northern state of Uttarakhand) Photo: FRANCIS MASCARENHAS/REUTERS

Since then, rescuers have tried various strategies to breach the tunnel's stubborn maw, burrowing both horizontally and vertically like determined moles, yet to no avail. Then they turned to a very small conduit tube, threaded and wedged through a few yards of concrete, rock and dirt. This provided hot food, medicine and a camera’s view of the trapped miners. This was good, but the situation was getting desperate.

And so we came to last week, when desperation led to two pronged effort. The first involves a vertical shaft that will descend from the top of the hill, smart but it involves going twice as far vertically as is needed horizontally. Verily, an arduous task, fraught with challenges, one that is expected to consume four days.

But the other tactic is my favorite. It’s as old-school as possible. A group of miners are going to get as close as they can to the trapped miners and they are going to use their hands. And they are going to use some hand-mining tools. And they will break down the rocks, they will remove the dirt. They will work inch by inch, rock by rock.

It’s called Rat-mining. In a time when we can peer light-years away in space, rewrite genes and split the atom, sometimes the moments which pit man against mountain that lift my spirits.

It’s good.