A partial tunnel collapse in India has rescuers scrambling to rescue 40 construction workers trapped under the debris.
As of Tuesday, all 40 laborers were alive — a remarkable development given the dangerous conditions posed by such a disaster, and the risks involved in getting the men out, says Daniel Aldrich, a Northeastern professor and director of the university’s Security and Resilience Program and co-director at the Global Resilience Institute.
The collapse, located in the state of Uttarakhand, underscores just how precarious conditions on job sites are in India — a country of 1.4 billion people — where regulatory oversight can’t keep pace with the rate of development, Aldrich says.
“We always say that an accident is never a single moment, although we often see it as a single moment,” Aldrich says. “An accident is a series of mistakes.”
