10 dead, 30 may be trapped in landslide
Rescuers pulled out the bodies of 10 people after a landslide buried at least five vehicles, including two buses, on a road in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur district on Wednesday afternoon.
As night set in, operations were called off for lack of visibility, diminishing hopes of finding more survivors among the at least 30 who were still missing. At least 14 people were rescued as disaster relief personnel, locals and men from the Indo-tibetan Border Police attempted to dig their way through to where most of the
SHIMLA:
vehicles were buried.
The missing included passengers of two buses that could not be reached till late evening and an unknown number of people feared to have been swept off the road and into a steep drop to a river.
“Apart from the buses, threeto-four vehicles could be under the debris, which is spread over 70 to 80 metres,” said Kinnaur deputy commissioner Abid Hussain Sadiq. “The locals told us that the landslide struck so suddenly that the drivers of the vehicles did not get time to react,” he added.
The incident took place near a village called Nigulsari on the national highway connecting state capital Shimla to Reckong Peo. Nigulsari is nestled at an altitude of roughly 5,900 ft and the highway that snakes along the mountainside is a narrow, two-lane road.
Disasters due to landslides and flashfloods during the Juneseptember monsoon season are not uncommon in the higher
HIMACHAL HAS RECORDED AN INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF LANDSLIDES THIS YEAR