Nepalese rescue workers searching for a missing person in an area affected by a landslide at Lamo Sanghu villge on the Sukoshi river, some 80km northeast of Kathmandu, yesterday.
AFP/Kathmandu
Heavy rains in Nepal yesterday forced rescuers to halt their search for bodies buried under tonnes of mud following the deadliest landslide in the country for almost a decade, police said.
Thirty-four bodies, including of seven children, have been pulled from the rubble after a landslide slammed into hamlets along a river in Sindhupalchok district before dawn on Saturday.
Eyewitnesses and officials said at least 130 more people were missing, but bad weather forced workers, who have been using bulldozers and excavators, to temporarily abandon attempts to find them.
“We have not been able to find any bodies today, heavy rain has caused us to stop our search operations,” regional police chief Subodh Ghimire said.
“The rain has made an already difficult job even more challenging,” said Ghimire from badly hit Jure village.
The downpour renewed the threat of flooding of the Sunkoshi river which has been blocked by landslide debris, Ghimire said.
The landslide has created an artificial lake in the Sunkoshi which runs across the border into India’s Bihar as the Kosi river.
Army specialists were preparing to use explosives to breach a mud dam blocking the river.
Residents downstream had started moving to higher ground following the announcement, and precautions were being taken as far away as India for an oncoming rush of water.
“The Nepal army personnel will cause explosions on the mud wall, so that the water can be drained gradually,” chief district officer of Sindupalchowk Gopal Parajuli said.
Parajuli said it was uncertain what effect the blasts would have.
As the search for bodies in Nepal was halted, local officials said a landslide had also struck Nepal’s eastern Sankhuwasabha district, leaving six people dead with four others missing.
The landslide hit the hilly district, which borders Tibet, in the early hours on Monday, crushing three houses, district official Nanda Kishor Tripathi said.
Scores of people die every year from flooding and landslides during Nepal’s monsoon season.
According to the home ministry, 39 people died in a landslide in the Kapilvastu district, home to the Buddha’s birthplace Lumbini, in July 2005.
Three years earlier, more than 150 people were killed when multiple mudslides struck two villages in the eastern district of Khotang in the deadliest landslide disaster to hit the
Himalayan nation.
Saturday’s landslide came as rescuers said 143 bodies have now been found in the western Indian state of Maharashtra where a major landslide destroyed a village last week.
At least 150 people are believed to have been killed there after a hill collapsed from heavy rains burying the village.
