At least 14 people were killed and more than 150 people went missing after a flash flood swept through a Himalayan mountain valley in northern India, bumping into hydropower projects and wiping out workers on the sites.
The flood was caused when a glacier near the Rishi Ganga River, one of the Ganges’ tributaries, broke on Sunday morning and disintegrated into the river. Local television images showed a huge wave of brown water swirling through the valley, flooding the coasts, causing avalanches and toppling buildings.
The water ran into a small hydropower project, flushing out a dam and building a larger hydropower project downstream. According to Mukesh Kumar, a data submitter at the disaster management agency in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand state, where the incident took place, about 154 people working on the two projects at the time were missing Sunday evening.
“The 14 bodies of the workers have been removed from the river,” said Mr Kumar. “We won’t know the identities of the dead and missing workers until tomorrow.”
Police assisted in the rescue after a small hydroelectric dam was flooded in the village of Chormi, Uttarakhand on February 7.
Photo:
Reuters
Army, police and teams of the Indian National Disaster Response Force helped rescue work late into the night, including digging out workers trapped in a tunnel at one of the sites. On Sunday, Navy divers were flown while the Indian Air Force was on standby to assist with any rescue efforts, the government said.
“All of our attention is now on the rescue,” Trivendra Singh Rawat, the state’s prime minister, said in a newsletter.
Hundreds of people died in the same state after a similar flood in 2013, when the wall of a glacial lake broke after heavy rainfall – through a valley filled with thousands of pilgrims visiting one of Hinduism’s holiest temples.
After that disaster, more than 4,000 people were missing, although the official death toll remained at a few hundred, government officials said at the time.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he spoke to senior officials and received updates on rescue and relief operations. He announced a government fund to support the families of the victims and those injured in the disaster.
“India is behind Uttarakhand and the nation is there praying for everyone’s safety”, he said on Twitter.
—Rajesh Roy contributed to this article.
Write to Krishna Pokharel at [email protected]
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