RUDRAPRAYAG, India (AP) – Rescue workers in North India were on duty Monday to rescue more than three dozen power plant workers trapped in a tunnel after part of a Himalayan glacier broke down and a wall of water and debris covered stormed downhill in a disaster, 18 people were killed and 165 missing.
More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police have participated in search and rescue operations in the northern state of Uttarakhand after Sunday’s flood, destroying one dam, damaging another and washing houses downstream.
Officials said the focus was on rescuing 37 workers trapped in a tunnel at one of the affected hydroelectric plants. Excavators had been deployed to reach the workers, who have lost contact since the flood.
“The tunnel is filled with debris from the river. We use machines to clear the way, ”said H. Gurung, a senior official in the Indo-Tibetan Paramilitary Border Police.
Authorities fear death much more and searched downstream for bodies with boats. They also walked along river banks, using binoculars to scan for bodies that may have been washed downstream.
The flood was caused when part of the Nanda Devi glacier broke Sunday morning, releasing water that was trapped, according to a disaster specialist, it could be related to global warming. The flood water flowed down the mountain and into other waters, forcing the evacuation of many villages along the banks of the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers.
Video from the northern state of Uttarakhand in India showed the muddy, concrete-gray floodwater tumbling through a valley and into a dam, which broke it to pieces with little resistance before roaring downstream. The flood turned the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.
A hydroelectric power station on the Alaknanda was destroyed and a factory under construction on the Dhauliganga was damaged, said Vivek Pandey, a spokesman for the Indo-Tibetan border police. The two rivers originate in the Himalaya Mountains and meet before merging with the Ganges River.
The trapped workers were at the factory in Dhauliganga, where 12 workers were rescued from a separate tunnel on Sunday.
A senior government official told The Associated Press that they do not know the total number of people working in the Dhauliganga project. “The number of missing people can go up or down,” SA Murugesan said.
Pandey said on Monday that 165 workers from the two factories, excluding those trapped in the tunnel, were missing and at least 18 bodies were recovered.
The rescued Sundays were taken to a hospital, where they were recovering.
One of the rescued workers, Rakesh Bhatt, told The Associated Press that they were working in the tunnel when water poured in.
“We thought it might be rain and the water would give way. But when we saw mud and debris coming in at great speed, we realized that something big had happened, ”he said.
Bhatt said one of the workers was able to contact officials via his cell phone.
“We waited nearly six hours – prayed to God and joked with each other to keep us excited. I was the first to be rescued and it was a great relief, ”he said.
The Himalayan region where the flood hit has a series of hydropower projects on several rivers and their tributaries. Authorities said they were able to save other power plants downstream due to timely action taken to release water by opening gates.
The floodwaters also damaged homes, but details of the number and whether residents were injured, missing or dead have remained unclear. Officials said they were trying to find out if anyone was missing in villages along the two rivers.
Government officials sent food packages and medicines to at least two flood-hit villages.
Many people in nearby villages work at the factory in Dhauliganga, Murugesan said, but since it was a Sunday, fewer people were working than on a weekday.
“The only consolation for us is that there are far fewer casualties from nearby villages,” he said.
Some have already begun to point to climate change as a contributing factor, given the well-known melting and disintegration of the world’s glaciers, although other factors such as erosion, earthquakes, a build-up of water pressure and volcanic eruptions have also been known to cause glaciers to collapse.
Anjal Prakash, research director and assistant professor at the Indian School of Business who contributed to UN-sponsored global warming research, said that while data on the cause of the disaster was not yet available, “this seems very much. on a climate change event as glaciers melt as a result of global warming. ”
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Banerjee reported from Lucknow, India.