Frantic rescue work afoot as hope fades
Five more bodies recovered from river, U’khand glacier breach toll at 31, 175 still missing
: The rescue operation in the aftermath of the flash floods on Sunday continued on the third day on Tuesday in the disaster-hit Chamoli district of Uttarakhand as the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) recovered five more bodies from the Alaknanda river on Tuesday, taking the death toll to 31 with 175 people still missing.
Surging waters on Sunday washed away homes, damaged two major dams, cut off 13 villages, and snapped crucial road links and bridges that connect far-flung areas in the Himalayan region. The worst disaster to hit the region in eight years struck when a glacier breach under the Nanda Devi, the country’s second-highest peak, sent a torrent of water, rock, and dust down a valley into the Rishiganga river, where workers were building a dam.
Visuals showed the muddy floodwaters smashing most of the plant and inundating bridges before roaring downstream into the Dhauliganga and partially damaging the National Thermal Power Corporation’s 530 MW Tapovan Vishnugrad project,
roughly 8 km away.
On Tuesday, two of the bodies were recovered from the debris in Raini village, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) officials said. The State Emergency Operation Centre said five bodies were found in the morning and estimated that 175 people are still missing.
Praveen Alok, an SDRF spokesman, said, “Till Tuesday noon, 31 bodies were recovered, including five from the river on Tuesday morning. The SDRF teams are continuously scanning
the river and riverside to search bodies.”
With the hours ticking by inexorably, fears escalated about those missing since the disaster struck on Sunday morning, according to officials who stepped up efforts to locate survivors.
The missing people include those working at NTPC’s Tapovan project and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydel Project — most of whom were from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand — and villagers whose homes nearby were washed away.
Teams of the Indian Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), NDRF and SDRF coordinated efforts to rescue about 30 people who were working in the 1.7-km-long tunnel at the Tapovan project when the waters came rushing in.
The workers have been trapped in the 12-ft-high and about 2.5-km-long ‘head race tunnel’ (HRT).
“Clearing of debris and slush continued the whole night. About 120 metres of the tunnel entrance stretch is now clear,” ITBP spokesperson Vivek Kumar Pandey said in Delhi. “The height of the accumulated slush has reduced more. ITBP personnel are waiting to enter as soon as any movement deep inside the tunnel is possible,” he said.
A senior official added that the rescuers have not been able to make any contact with those stuck inside but are hopeful for “signs of life”.
Relief is also being distributed by helicopters among villagers cut off due to the washing away of a bridge in the avalanche at Malari. About 100 ration kits have been distributed in the affected areas of 13 villages with a total population of around 2,500, officials said.
The villages that lost road connectivity in the wake of the calamity are Raini Palli, Pang, Lata, Suraithota, Suki, Bhalgaon, Tolma, Fagrasu, Long Segdi, Gahar, Bhangyul, Juwagwad and Jugju.
On Tuesday, chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat undertook an aerial survey of the affected areas, visited the 13 villages and also met the injured in the army hospital in Joshimath near the disaster site.
The priority is to get to those trapped inside the tunnel and save as many lives as possible, he said.
Additional heavy machines could be pressed into service to expedite the process of clearing the tonnes of debris inside the tunnel, blocking the path of rescue personnel. The clearing of slush and debris is a painstaking exercise but the multi-agency group of rescuers are there in large numbers and taking turns to dig in deeper with the help of heavy machines, officials said.
The teams have been working since Sunday to clear the tunnel and rescue the trapped.
As the temperature dipped to freezing levels at the site, awash with slush, silt and debris, bonfires were lit at multiple locations to keep the rescuers warm.
The tunnel has become the focal point of rescue operations.
While the ITBP has deployed as many as 300 personnel for conducting rescue operations at this site, many NDRF, SDRF and army personnel are also present.
The ITBP and other rescuers are carrying tall wooden planks which are being used by rescuers to wade in through the slush and will later also help create a platform to pull out the trapped people using ropes.
In Delhi, Union home minister Amit Shah told Parliament that rescue efforts were on a “war footing”. He said there was no danger of flooding in low-lying areas of the region.
Experts differed on what triggered the disastrous flash floods. US-based scientists who looked at satellite images suggested it was caused by a landslide onto a glacier which led to debris flooding the river.
But a group of Indian scientists said there was no landslide or avalanche but pointed at the possibility of a glacial lake that led to the breach. They said release of water from an underground glacial lake led to flash floods and inundation in the valley.