Desperate rescue effort in Himalayas
170 missing after glacier collapse
LUCKNOW: Rescuers were looking for an estimated 170 people missing in the Indian Himalayas yesterday, including some trapped in a tunnel, after a part of a glacier broke away, sending a torrent of water, rock and dust down a mountain valley.
Sunday’s violent surge below Nanda Devi, India’s secondhighest peak, swept away a small hydroelectric project called Rishiganga and damaged a bigger one further downstream on the Dhauliganga River, being built by statefirm NTPC.
The bodies of 12 people had been recovered, officials said.
Most of the missing were people working on the two projects, part of the many the Government has been building deep in the mountains of Uttarakhand state as part of a development push.
‘‘As per the information from the local authorities, around 170 people are missing in this accident,’’ Vivek Pandey, a spokesman for the IndoTibetan Border Police that is involved in the rescue effort, said
Rescue squads were focused on drilling their way through a 2.5kmlong tunnel at the Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectricity project site that NTPC was building 5km downstream, where about 30 workers were believed trapped.
‘‘We are trying to break open the tunnel, it’s a long one, about 2.5km,’’ state police chief Ashok Kumar said. He last night said rescuers had gone 150m into the tunnel, but debris and slush was slowing progress.
There had been no voice contact yet with anyone in the tunnel, another official said.
On Sunday, 12 people were rescued from another tunnel that was much smaller.
Videos on social media showed muddy, concretegrey floodwaters tumbling through a valley and surging into a dam, breaking it into pieces with little resistance before roaring downstream.
‘‘Everything was swept away, people, cattle and trees,’’ Sangram Singh Rawat, a former village council member of Raini, the site closest to the glacier, said.
‘‘It all started sometime around 10 in the morning. We heard a bang, which shook our village,’’ Raini village resident Dinesh Negi said.
He said people watched from high above one of the rivers as the water turned muddy and surged in a torrent.
‘‘We knew something wrong had happened,’’ Negi said.
‘‘We could see the fury of the river.’’
It was not immediately clear what had set off the avalanche at this time of year, with freezing temperatures and no rain.
A team of scientists were flown over the site of the latest accident yesterday for surveillance to find out what exactly happened.
‘‘It’s a very rare incident for a glacial burst to happen,’’ Indian Institute of Technology glaciology and hydrology assistant professor Mohd Farooq Azam said. — Reuters/AP