67 from UP still untraceable, 23 safe, three dead
UP ministers, officials camping in hill state to coordinate rescue and relief work
LUCKNOW: Sixty-seven people from Uttar Pradesh remained untraceable till Wednesday evening while 23 others from the state were located or rescued and three confirmed as dead after a glacier burst in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on February 7, relief commissioner Sanjay Goel said even as UP ministers Suresh Rana, Dharam Singh Saini and Vijay Kashyap were camping at Haridwar in the hill state to coordinate relief and rescue work.
Three deaths were confirmed, Rana said over the phone from Haridwar, adding two of them were from Lakhimpur Kheri and one from Aligarh.
The dead included Awadhesh, 19, resident of Icchanagar village, and Suraj, 20, resident of Babupurwa village, both from Lakhimpur Kheri district’s Nigahasan tehsil, and Ajay Sharma, 32, resident of Aligarh district.
“A massive exercise is underway to trace others. We had alerted all the district magistrates to issue appeals to anyone whose friends or relatives had travelled to Uttarakhand, especially Chamoli. Throughout the day, we have been coordinating and collating information,” Rana said.
“A team of National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and the Army is working round the clock. We are in touch with them and gathering information. Along with this, we are also collecting photographs of all the missing people from UP and checking with UK (Uttarakhand) authorities about their safety. Simultaneously, we are also besieged with calls from kin of the missing who are aware we are here,” Rana said.
Goel said the emergency control room established by the
state government in various districts received information about 93 missing people till Wednesday. Out of them, 23 were rescued or located and three were dead.
Among the 67 missing people, 31 are from Lakhimpur Kheri, 12 from Saharanpur, five from Shravasti, four from Gorakhpur, two each from Kushinagar and Rae Bareli and one each from Amroha, Azamgarh, Bulandshahr, Chandauli, Deoria, Gautam Buddh Nagar, Mathura, Mirzapur, Moradabad, Shahjahanpur and Sonbhadra.
A report from Lakhimpur Kheri said district magistrate Shailendra Kumar Singh confirmed the death of Awadhesh and Suraj. The bodies were recovered from the debris at the Tapovan hydro power project in Chamoli.
Awadhesh’s body was brought to his village on Tuesday night, while the body of Suraj was expected to arrive early on Thursday morning. Both of them had been working at the Tapovan project as labourers. Nighasan tehsil officials visited the family members of Awadhesh on Wednesday, assuring them all assistance. The last rites of Awadhesh were performed at his native village on Wednesday.
Rana, along with UP’s Ayush minister Dharam Singh Saini and minister of state for revenue and flood control Vijay Kashyap, had rushed to the hill state on Tuesday to aid the relief and rescue work. The ministers, after meeting Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, had camped in Haridwar. A team of Uttar Pradesh officials is also camping in Joshimath and Dehradun. They include administrative and police officials from Saharanpur, Bijnor, Lakhimpur Kheri and a flood expert from the relief commissioner’s office.
Officials said while many had been missing, some others had panicked despite the fact that their relatives were more than 300 kilometres away from the site of avalanche.
Take Imran Khan’s father Ikram Hussain from Moradabad, for instance. Ikram, who does odd jobs for a living, feared for his son’s safety after being unable to reach him since the news of the glacier burst spread.
“I was unable to reach my son, his mobile was switched off and I panicked and called the helpline numbers. However, I later came to know that my son was about 350 kilometres away from the site of the glacier burst. It was just that since the power supply in the village was affected, he couldn’t charge his phone and that’s why we had become apprehensive,” he said.
Similarly, Kusum, whose brother-in-law is in the army and posted some 350 kilometres away from the Chamoli site, said, since there was no connection with the army man for two days, the family panicked.
“But now all is well. He is safe,” said Kusum.