Forty Indian workers have been trapped underground since yesterday, Sunday, after a road tunnel under construction collapsed in northern India.

A spokesman for the rescue teams announced today that they are alive and rescuers are communicating with them, in a setting reminiscent of his thriller San Jose Minein the Atacama desert Chile in August 2010, with the 33 “hero” miners.

“The 40 workers trapped inside the tunnel are alive. We sent them water and foodKaramvir Singh Bhandari, commander of the National Disaster Response Force, said in a statement.

The collapse occurred early Sunday morning in the Indian Himalayas, when a group of workers was leaving the construction site and a replacement group was arriving.

The first contact with the survivors it was done through a one-to-one message piece of paperHowever, the rescuers then managed to communicate by radio.

The rescuers explained how they channeled oxygen in the zone of the collapsed tunnel and managed to channel as well food through the same conduit.

“Some small packages of food were sent through a pipeline that also brings oxygen inside,” Dargesh Rathodi, head of rescue services in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, told AFP from the crash site.

Excavators have removed about 20 meters of rubble, but workers are 40 meters away.

“Because there is a lot of rubble in the tunnel, we are facing some difficulties in the rescue operation,” said Bandari.

Uttarakhand state chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, who went to the site of the accident today, told Platform X that rescue operations were continuing “non-stop to get them out safely”.

“The good thing is that the workers are not on top of each other, but have a space of about 400 meters to walk and breatheDevendra Patwal of the Indian Express assured.

The tunnel is part of the Sar Dham Expressway construction program promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is designed to improve connections between four Hindu sites, among the country’s most important, as well as the border regions of China.

Accidents at major infrastructure construction sites are common in India.

In January, at least 200 people died in flash floods in Uttarakhand, a disaster that experts attributed in part to overdevelopment.