Rana was happy. He saw the disaster unfold from above in the village of Raini, where he built a new railway for the Hyderabad-based Rithwik Railway Company. But several of his associates below could not see the danger along the way.
Those from the higher vantage point shouted to warn them.
“The five or six people who heard it ran. Some people were rescued,” Rana said.
The rest are among the nearly 200 people still missing after part of a glacier collapsed in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand on Sunday. This caused a massive avalanche that tore through a mountain gorge and collided through a dam.
Authorities were able to rescue a handful of individuals immediately after the disaster, and another 126 people from the nearby Niti Valley were rescued by helicopter.
Three days after the tragedy, the search for survivors continues. So far, the bodies of 32 people have been found – and as the clock continues to tick, hopes for those who have not yet been reported have faded.
A handful of villages in the remote region, where there are few roads, have now been cut off from the outside world, including Rana’s home of Pan, where his wife is trapped.
It is not clear exactly what caused the piece of glacier to fall off, causing the avalanche. Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah told parliament a landslide caused an “avalanche” that spread over 14 square kilometers (5 square miles), causing flash floods.
Manish Mehta, a senior scientist at the Wadia Institute of Geology in the Himalayas, who is exploring the site with four colleagues, said preliminary evidence shows that a “large rock slide” near the glacier could be blamed for the the avalanche. The extent of the ensuing flash flood was unprecedented, he added, and could affect ‘more than 100 square kilometers (38 square miles).’
Dr. Dan Shugar, a professor at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Calgary, said in a tweet on Tuesday that a landslide suggested part of a hanging glacier.
“The glacier that we think collapsed is a very steep, sloping glacier. It is not a typical low-slope valley glacier / slope that sometimes has lakes at the end,” Shugar said. added that the landslide probably ice both the rock and the glacier. “It sank down a steep slope and probably crumbled when it hit the valley floor.”
As the ice melts, glaciers become unstable and begin to retreat. A study from 2019 found that the glaciers of the Himalayas melt twice as fast as the previous century and lose almost half a meter of ice each year.
Others have pointed to construction along the rivers of the state, which in recent years has connected an increasing number of hydroelectric dams, projects and infrastructure, such as roads and new developments.
Dozens of workers building a series of underground tunnels for a new power station near the dam were trapped by the avalanche on Sunday, including Virendra Kumar Gautam. On that day, around 11:00, he and his team heard shouts from outside the tunnel saying they had to evacuate.
He ordered his team to pull over. After traveling about 50 meters, Gautam recalls: “suddenly a flood came in, glacier and water came in full force.”
Gautam and the others climbed emergency ladders built into the walls. Their section of the tunnel was only about 4.5 meters (14.5 feet) high, but water quickly reached about 3.5 meters high (11.5 feet).
“I always helped people get up and told them that they would survive and not have to worry, everything would be fine,” he said.
Gautam was right. The water level suddenly dropped, he said, being shallow enough to pass the group and climb about 350 meters (1,150 feet) up the ladder to the surface.
Gautam said it took his team about 90 minutes, but in the end they made it safe.
Others, however, were not so happy. There are still people trapped in the tunnels, and according to authorities, those inside may not have survived unless the debris somehow blocked the water and left enough air in the tunnels to put the men in breath.
Vidhyadhar Maletha, an employee at the Prithak company that oversees rescue efforts, said the four side tunnels and the main tunnel were all filled with rubble.
He said they cleared about 90 meters (295 feet) of debris, and that the tunnel dropped by 25 to 30 meters. But mud and rocks still block the way.
“There’s too much debris,” Maletha said.
CNN’s Helen Regan, Esha Mitra, Manveena Suri, Swati Gupta, Radina Gigova and Vedika Sud contributed to this report