The operation took approximately 6 hours. The last of the 65 miners reached the surface at 9:00 AM on November 16, with Gill being the final person to exit the mine. Legacy and Recognition
Then Gill did it again. And again. For over 30 hours, without sleep, Gill directed the operation from inside the flooded mine. He sent up the sick and the injured first. He kept the others calm by singing hymns and telling jokes. raniganj coal mine rescue full
The descent was agonizingly slow. Water dripped. Steel scraped stone. When the capsule broke into the air pocket, Gill saw them: 65 pairs of eyes glowing with terror and desperate hope. They had survived on muddy water and each other’s courage. Some were hallucinating. Others had begun writing letters to their families. The operation took approximately 6 hours
Deep beneath the dusty plains of West Bengal, 110 feet underground, the earth groaned. On November 13, 1989, at the Mahabir Colliery in the Raniganj coalfields, a disaster unfolded in absolute darkness. A coal mine, unstable and waterlogged, collapsed. Millions of gallons of water from an abandoned adjacent shaft—marked incorrectly on outdated maps—came roaring through the rock like a buried ocean unleashed. And again