How Arnold Dix became a Himalayan hero after rescuing 41 workers from Indian tunnel collapse

Victorian tunnelling expert, Arnold Dix, helped pull off a miracle when 41 workers were rescued from rubble after a highway collapse. (Supplied: Arnold Nix)

Arnold Dix slid his hand into a gap in the rock at the entrance to a tunnel where 41 men were trapped alive, put his back against the cold stone and listened, and felt, and listened some more.

What was the mountain telling him? There was data, of course, all sorts of readings, high-tech drones and geological wizardry, but Dix has “listened to the rock” ever since he was a kid growing up in the shadow of the Snowy Hydro scheme, tagging along with the miners.

Now he was in the Himalayas, choppered in by the Indian government in November last year in a last-ditch attempt to help rescue the men who had already endured a week of deprivation and fear that, at any moment, the mountain could collapse on top of them.

Outside, an emotion-charged, makeshift village had sprung up, filled with desperate families, rescuers, officials and hordes of Indian and international media waiting for news.

Dix kept listening to the rock.

The international tunnelling expert from Monbulk, east of Melbourne, had done the same in Albania years before. Back then, he didn’t like what he heard, ordering everyone out. The tunnel collapsed.

But here, in Uttarakhand, “Land of the Gods” bordering Tibet and Nepal, Dix felt they had time. Not a lot but, hopefully, enough to save the men.

“I felt an unhappy mountain,” Dix tells Australian Story. “I felt an unstable mountain. I did also feel it was going to collapse, just not quite then.”

Dix’s intuitive approach is not unheard of; geologists talk of listening to the rock just as sailors talk of reading the sea.

But 60-year-old Dix is unusual — a renaissance man who, along with dabbling as a flower farmer, truck driver and welder, has forged an unorthodox career path.

He was a scientist specialising in geology first, before switching to law and the bar, becoming the highest billing partner of a top-tier legal firm.

His trajectory changed again in September 2001 when he went to New York with a client to investigate the underground networks of the World Trade Centres in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

His shock at the loss of so many lives led to an epiphany.

“Suddenly it hits me,” Dix says. “Wouldn’t it be better to have a life where I helped many people a little, even if they don’t know me, than to help a few because they’ve got the money to pay?”

His life underground began, ditching the firm to become a consultant on tunnelling regulations, safety and disasters, combining his science and law to rise to the role as president of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association.

But until he landed at the site where the 41 men were trapped — part of a massive Modi-government project burrowing through mountains to create a highway linking Hindu pilgrimage sites — Dix had never conducted a rescue.

“I’ve always been involved in recovering bodies, lessons learned, trying to understand how we ended up with the dead ones,” Dix says.

“This time, I’m playing with 41 lives that we still have and also the lives of the rescuers …The epic begins with the stage set, with everything to lose.”

Dix finished listening to the rock.

He walked out of that tunnel to the expectant gaze of anxious onlookers and uttered what would become his mantra: 41 men will be coming home by Christmas and no rescuers will be hurt.

The truth is, Dix wasn’t certain about that. “Of course, I know there is a real immediate risk that many people could die, including myself,” he says now. “But I also knew the only chance we had to perform the rescue was that I show belief.”

‘Eccentric, chaotic and brilliant’

The boots Dix wore as he trudged up the mountains and into the forests, assessing and listening, were not his boots. He’d grabbed the wrong ones as he left home. They belonged to his daughter, Hannah.

They were too small but big on symbolism. Hannah also works underground, on Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel Project. “I have a daughter who is a miner,” he told media at the rescue site, “so I treat all of those 41 as if they are my daughter trapped.”

He has two other children, Sam and Edward, from his first marriage of 23 years, and is now also father to Trisha, the teenage daughter of the woman he married last year, Divina.

Dix met Divina, an underground safety officer, in Qatar after being employed to consult on safety and engineering issues at the oil-rich emirate’s new international airport in 2011 in the lead-up to football’s 2022 world cup.

Dix noticed many foreign labourers on the job were listless and falling asleep. He discovered they weren’t lazy but hungry, victims of immigration scams who paid big money for visas on the promise of good jobs that didn’t materialise. Many had their passports stolen and were left to scrounge for work, shelter and food.

“The more I scratched the surface and learnt about what was going on, the more troubling and troubled I found it,” Dix says. “So I searched for a solution.”

Dix reveals to Australian Story that for about eight years, he ran a secret humanitarian operation, feeding and housing men and women and helping some get out of Qatar.

A family friend and mentor to Dix, retired Victorian lawyer George Madden, says Dix was “a bit like a one-man Salvation Army”.

“I went to Qatar [and] that group of young men were very, very needy. And he did a very good and kind and friendly act for them,” Madden says.

Dix says that’s been part of his make-up since he was a boy, growing up as the son of hoteliers who moved from pub to pub. “I’ve always had this burning feeling about what’s fair and what’s not fair. I’ve never seen it as a complicated thing,” Dix says.

“Just because there are horrible people doesn’t mean we all have to be horrible. If our species has got a future, it means that the civilised aspects of how we behave … the bit about your mind and your hand doing good things, has to win.”

Gail Greenwood has been Dix’s business manager since he was “a baby barrister”, specialising in environmental law. He’s eccentric, she says, chaotic and brilliant at the same time, with an incredible capacity to process data quickly and find a solution. He’s hopeless at business, though, often neglecting to charge people. Or choosing not to.

He’s best described as an enigma, she says, “a puzzle that’s undefinable”.

Greenwood says “he’s always for the underdog, always,” so she was not surprised when he dropped everything to head to India. “There is nobody that I know that has the same skill-set as him, or that has the same drive to make things happen for the good of everybody around him. He was the right man for the job because he’s Arnold Dix.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Rahul Gupta, India’s chief engineer who watched as Dix threw himself into the rescue effort. “He was inside the tunnel,” Gupta says. “He was over the mountains. He was deep in the jungles. He was in the meetings with the top management. He was with the rescuers … the media.”

Before Dix arrived, says Gupta, pessimism had crept in at the site after seven days of thwarted rescue attempts. Dix’s optimistic attitude, coupled with multi-pronged plans of action and his aura of calm, helped build confidence the men would come out alive.

As did a small, symbolic, act. The collapse had happened on Diwali, India’s most important holiday, and many believed it was because the gods were unhappy with the road piercing the mountains. On arrival at the collapsed site, Dix went straight to a shrine outside the tunnel and prayed.

Says Dix: “Their view was we have an unhappy awakening god of the mountain. So, I need to, I must, kneel before this temple. Because this is the right thing to do.”

41 men home safe in ‘Christmas miracle’

Dix says his instinct was always to go soft and slow with the rescue.

From his side of the collapse, Dix saw evidence of 21 smaller collapses. When a small pipe was pushed through the 70 metres of rubble to insert an endoscopic camera, Dix, like the rest of the world, was thrilled to see the men for the first time. But he also saw worrying signs of collapse inside. Time was running out and the vibrations of the heavy machinery was cribbing back that time.

Soon after, the 25-tonne auger, a corkscrew-like drilling machine that had been flown in and assembled on site, broke down. Irrevocably. It was 12 metres short of reaching the men. Another method being tried simultaneously, drilling from above, was becoming risky, with Dix fearing it could trigger collapse.

The soft and slow plan was put into action. “The legacy of the failed machine,” says Dix, “is we have a pipe part-way through the avalanche material, and it’s just big enough to crawl through.”

First, the rescuers removed the auger with plasma cutters. Then, “we sent people in the pipe to excavate the rocks, rock by rock into a little cart that we made on site”.

Dix put his welding skills to work, consulting with the chief fabricator to devise segmented steel pipes that could be inserted to support the void. “We extended that pipe section through the avalanche, literally millimetre by millimetre, by excavating rock.”

On November 28, 17 days after the saga began, the hand miners chipped their way through to the trapped men. One by one, those men climbed into the pipe and crawled out into the outside world.

Forty-one men coming home for Christmas, alive, no rescuers hurt.

An ‘ambassador for love and peace’

There’s a joyous video of a group of men, singing and dancing on a fallen log high on a Himalayan mountain in the hours after the rescue. One of them, in his orange safety shirt and a paper party hat, is a beaming Arnold Dix.

The rest of the men are his Indian rescue crew, happily singing the name Arnold Dix as they celebrate the man they call a hero. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times.

Dix is feted in India now, a country that was transfixed by live broadcasts of the rescue, hanging on Dix’s every word. “He has become truly an ambassador of hope and peace,” says Gupta.

At home, Dix has been honoured at Indian celebrations, asked by Australian/Indian artist Murali Surya to sit for a national portraiture competition and heralded by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a “truly great Australian”.

Before India, Dandenong locals knew him as Arnold, the bloke who was “the worst flower grower in Monbulk”, or the occasional delivery truck driver. “I was absolutely satisfied to be completely unknown … happy for my own deeds to be unknown,” says Dix.

“Now that I’m known [my way of] coming to grips with that is saying, ‘I am now an ambassador for good people doing nice things’.”

He never asked for payment for his role in the rescue, it wouldn’t be decent, he says. But, as with his other pro bono work, he has a price.

“Find the injustice,” Dix says. “You can find the people in need, that’s a matter for you. Find something that you care about [and] pay it back.”

Watch Australian Story’s Man Underground 8:00pm Monday on ABCTV and ABC iview.

[Zendesk]