SHILLONG: New equipment joined the operations on Monday to rescue 15 miners trapped in an illegal rat-hole coal mine at Ksan in East Jaintia Hills district since December 13 even as the water level in it showed no change despite continuous pumping out of water by several agencies using high-powered pumps.
Sources said Chennai-based Planys Technologies will bring in a SONAR (Sound Navigation And Ranging) on Tuesday to help in underwater detection in the shaft of the mine where the miners are trapped.
The SONAR uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of the water.
The sources said that the SONAR radiates sound and if it detects any object it will give out a signal. The Planys team will be able to use this equipment to map out the rat holes and create a blue print of the inside of the mine.
However, a SONAR used by the NDRF earlier had failed to yield the desired results.
Official sources on Monday said Dewashish Kumar, a senior scientist from the Hyderabad-based National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), a constituent research laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), carried out an electric tomography survey to assess the rock strata around the mine.
The NGRI team also used a ground penetrating radar.
Also, a team from Planys operated an underwater remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) to survey a nearby mine shaft while that of the Indian Navy got stuck in the shaft of the ill-fated mine on Sunday night. Navy divers were at work to retrieve it.
Coal India Ltd and Odisha Fire Service continued to pump out water, but a survey conducted by the former showed there had been little or no change in the water level of the mine it was working on.
Divers of NDRF and Indian Navy have been made virtually redundant with the water level in the main mine not dropping enough for them to go in to search for the miners.
