10 dead, 30 trapped in Kinnaur landslide
At least five vehicles, including two buses, buried under debris spread over 70 to 80 metres: Officials
SHIMLA: 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 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 Negulsari on the national highway connecting state capital Shimla to Reckong Peo. Negulsari 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 regions of Himalayan states, but Himachal Pradesh has this year recorded an increase in such incidents: there were 116% more landslides till the end of July this year as compared to 2020, and cloudbursts– spells of extremely heavy rain -- have gone up by 121% this monsoon, according to data provided by the state disaster management authority.
A senior police official, who asked not to be named, said the vehicles had stopped on the road after debris from a smaller landslide blocked the way. The driver and the conductor of a Himachal Roadways Transport Corporation (HRTC) bus that was in the lead stepped out to look for a way through when a portion of the mountainside collapsed behind them.
There was a private bus, a jeep and a few cars behind the HRTC bus, the police officer said, quoting the bus driver who survived along with the conductor.
The two said there were at least 22 passengers in their bus, and another seven to eight in the other bus.
Among the bodies that were pulled out were eight passengers of a utility vehicle – such vehicles are typically used as shared taxis in these areas.
The official quoted above said the survivors were people who stepped out while waiting for the road to clear up, and were likely saved as they took shelter under a large rocky portion of the mountainside jutting out right above them.
“Some of them managed to leave their vehicles and were running back on the narrow road when the landslide came. They found safe space below rock and boulders,” the officer said, citing eyewitnesses.
An official said rescue work was treacherous amid heavy rain and the possibility that the digging machines could strike people buried in the landslide. “We had to be careful. Use of heavy machinery could have caused casualties,” said the deputy commissioner, who was among the first senior officers to reach the spot.
Lahaul-Spiti and Kinnaur were the worst hit districts this season with 13 landslides and 11 flashfloods, four of them triggered by cloudburst incidents, which officials said was an unusual frequency.
Earlier in the week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said extreme rainfall events in south Asia has increased in recent past and said such events are likely to increase in high altitudes and decrease in sub-tropics.