RUDRAPRAYAG, India (AP) – Rescuers in northern India worked on Monday to rescue more than three dozen power workers trapped in a tunnel after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off and a wall of water and litter in a disaster rushed to the mountain. 18 people were killed and 165 were missing.
More than 2,000 members of the army, paramilitary groups and police are taking part in search and rescue operations in the northern state of Uttarakhand after Sunday’s flood, which destroyed one dam, damaged the other and washed away houses downstream.
Officials said the focus is on rescuing 37 workers sitting in a tunnel at one of the hydropower plants involved. Excavators were helped to reach the workers who had been out of contact since the flood.
‘The tunnel is filled with debris that came from the river. We use machines to clear the way, “said H. Gurung, a senior official of the Indian Tibetan Border Police.
Authorities feared many more were killed and searched bodies upstream by boat. They also walked along riverbanks and searched with binoculars for bodies that may have washed downstream.
The flooding was caused when a section of the Nanda Devi Glacier cut off Sunday morning and released water trapped behind it. According to disaster experts, it could be related to global warming. The floodwaters stormed the mountain and forced into other bodies of water, forcing the villages along the banks of the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers.
The video from the northern state of Uttarakhand in India showed the muddy, concrete-gray floodwaters tumbling through a valley and breaking into a dam, breaking it to pieces with little resistance before roaring downstream. The flood turned the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored lunar landscape.
A hydroelectric power plant on the Alaknanda has been destroyed and a plant in Dhauliganga has been damaged, said Vivek Pandey, an Indian Tibetan border police spokesman. The two rivers flow from the mountains of the Himalayas before merging with the Ganges River.
The trapped workers were at the Dhauliganga plant, where 12 workers were rescued from a separate tunnel on Sunday.
A senior government official told The Associated Press that they did not know the total number of people working on the Dhauliganga project. “The number of missing people could rise or fall,” SA Murugesan said.
Pandey said Monday that 165 workers at the two plants, not those trapped in the tunnel, were missing and at least 18 bodies were recovered.
Those rescued Sunday were taken to a hospital where they are recovering.
One of the rescued workers, Rakesh Bhatt, told The Associated Press that they were working in the tunnel when water flowed in.
“We thought it might be raining and that the water would recede. But when we saw mud and debris coming in with great speed, we realized something big had happened, ”he said.
Bhatt said one of the workers was able to contact officers with his cell phone.
“We waited for almost six hours – prayed to God and joked with each other to keep our spirits high. “I was the first to be rescued and it was a great relief,” he said.
The Himalayan region where the flooding of Sunday took place has a series of hydropower projects on several rivers and their tributaries. Authorities said they were able to rescue other power units downstream as a result of timely action to release water by opening gates.
The floodwaters also damaged homes, but details of the number and whether residents were injured, missing or killed are unclear. Officials said they were trying to locate someone missing from villages along the two rivers.
Government officials delivered food parcels and medicine to at least two flood-hit towns.
Many people in nearby villages work at the plant in Dhauliganga, Murugesan said, but since it was a Sunday, fewer people were at work than on a weekday,
“The only consolation for us is that the casualties from the nearby villages are much less,” he said.
Some have already begun to point to climate change as a contributing factor given the known melting and eruption of the world’s glaciers, although other factors such as erosion, earthquakes, an accumulation of water pressure and volcanic eruptions are also known to cause glaciers to collapse.
Anjal Prakash, research director and deputy professor at the Indian School of Business, who contributed to the UN-sponsored research on global warming, said that although no information was yet available on the cause of the disaster, “it looks very much like a climate change. event when the glaciers melt due to global warming. “
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Banerjee reported from Lucknow, India.