Monitoring and air-driven fast-track drilling designed for emergent searching and rescuing operation in buried underground space

This paper presents a brief idea for an effective searching and rescuing people trapped in sealed underground spaces such as caverns and tunnels due to collapse of surrounding rock and soil masses.The idea is based on the fast construction hole drilling and its automatic digital monitoring.The drilling device is the compressed air-flow driven percussive-rotary drilling associated with a down-the-hole hammer.The drilling process monitoring allows an accurate and effective delinearing of the soil and rock strength and quality along the drill hole in real time,thus making it possible to quickly determine the location of the buried underground space and reach the people in the underground space,with the result that the compressed air-flow can flow into the buried underground space through the holes in the bit of the hammer.It follows that the method can come into effective and practical use for emergent searching and rescuing people trapped in buried underground space.