Twenty-six people were confirmed dead yesterday and more than 170 others were missing after a devastating flash flood in India thought to have been caused by a chunk of glacier breaking off.
The resulting wall of water and debris barrelled down a tight valley in India’s Himalayan north on Sunday morning, destroying bridges, roads and hitting two hydroelectric power plants.
Uttarakhand director general of police Ashok Kumar said late yesterday that 26 bodies had been recovered, and 171 people were still unaccounted for.
Most of those missing were workers at the two power plants, with some trapped in a U-shaped tunnel filled with mud and rocks when the flooding hit.
“If this incident happened in the evening, after work hours, the situation wouldn’t have been this bad as labourers and workers in and around the sites would have been at home,” Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat told reporters.
Twelve people were rescued from one side of the tunnel on Sunday but another 34 were still trapped at the other end, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police’s Banudutt Nair, who is in charge of the rescue operation, said.
With the main road washed away, paramilitary rescuers were forced to scale down a hillside on ropes to reach the entrance. Emergency workers were using heavy machinery to remove tonnes of rocks.
“Approximately 260 feet inside the tunnel is cleared and accessible,” said Vivek Kumar Pandey, another disaster official.
Around 1,000 rescuers – including from the military, police and national disaster personnel – resumed their search operation at first light yesterday.
Members of Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) watch as a machine is used to clear a tunnel after a part of a glacier broke away, in Tapovan in the northern state of Uttarakhand, India, yesterday.
