RUDRAPRAYAG, India (AP) – Rescuers in northern India worked Monday to rescue more than three dozen power plant workers trapped in a tunnel after part of the Himalayan glacier broke and sent a wall of water and debris who rushed down the mountain in a disaster that left 18 dead and 165 missing.
More than 2,000 members of the army, paramilitary groups and police took part in search and rescue operations in northern Uttarakhand after Sunday’s floods destroyed one dam, damaged another and washed downstream homes.
Officials said the focus was on rescuing 37 workers who are stranded in a tunnel at one of the affected hydropower plants. The excavators were brought to the rescue with efforts to reach the workers, who were out of contact with the flood.
“The tunnel is filled with debris that came from the river. We are using machinery to pave the way, “said H. Gurung, a senior official of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police paramilitary.
Authorities fear that several will be killed and searched for corpses downstream using boats. They also walked along the banks of rivers and used binoculars to look for bodies that could have been washed downstream.
The flood was caused when a portion of the Nanda Devi Glacier broke on Sunday morning, releasing water trapped behind it, according to a disaster expert, could be linked to global warming. Floodwaters rushed down the mountain and into other bodies of water, forcing the evacuation of many villages along the banks of the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers.
The video from the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand showed the muddy, gray-concrete mudslide that collapsed through a valley and rose into a dam, tearing it to pieces with little resistance before screaming downstream. The flood turned the countryside into what looked like a gray lunar landscape.
A hydroelectric plant on Alaknanda was destroyed and a plant under construction on Dhauliganga was damaged, said Vivek Pandey, a spokesman for the Indo-US Tibetan border police. Leaving the Himalayas, the two rivers meet before merging with the Ganges River.
The trapped workers went to the Dhauliganga plant, where on Sunday 12 workers were rescued from a separate tunnel.
A senior government official told the Associated Press that he did not know the total number of people working on the Dhauliganga project. “The number of missing people may increase or decrease,” said SA Murugesan.
Pandey said Monday that 165 workers at the two factories, except those trapped in the tunnel, were missing and at least 18 bodies had been recovered.
Those rescued on Sunday were taken to a hospital, where they were cured.
One of the rescued workers, Rakesh Bhatt, told the Associated Press that he was working in the tunnel when the water entered.
“I thought it might be raining and the water would recede. But when we saw the mud and debris coming in at high speed, we realized that something big had happened, ”he said.
Bhatt said one of the workers was able to contact officials via his mobile phone.
“We waited almost six hours – praying to God and joking with each other to keep our spirits up. I was the first to be rescued and it was a great relief, “he said.
The Himalayan area where Sunday’s flood took place has a chain of hydropower projects on several rivers and their tributaries. Authorities said they were able to save other supply units downstream due to timely measures to release water by opening the gates.
The flood waters also damaged the houses, but the details of the number and whether they were injured, missing or dead remained unclear. Officials said they were trying to find out if anyone was missing from the villages along the two rivers.
Government officials dumped food and medicine in at least two villages affected by the floods.
Many people from nearby villages work at the Dhauliganga plant, Murugesan said, but because it was Sunday, fewer people were at work than on a weekly day.
“The only consolation for us is that the victims in the nearby villages are much smaller,” he said.
Some have already begun to point to climate change as a contributing factor, given the known melting and rupture of the world’s glaciers, although other factors such as erosion, earthquakes, water pressure buildup and volcanic eruptions have also been known to cause the collapse of glaciers.
Anjal Prakash, research director and assistant professor at the Indian School of Business, who contributed to UN-sponsored research on global warming, said that while data on the cause of the disaster was not yet available, “this is very similar to a change. Climate event as glaciers melt due to global warming. ”
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Banerjee reported from Lucknow, India.