350-meter long lake formed upstream Rishiganga river

A 350 meter-long lake has formed upstream of river Rishiganga near here, the Uttarakhand Police said after a team of the State Disaster Relief Force trekked to the site on Friday.

“As per preliminary information, a lake formation has been noticed near Raini village, but it has been discharging water. It appears that the lake is 350 meters long,” the state police said.

It said that more details of the lake would be shared after the SDRF team returns from the site.

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A team of mountaineers and disaster relief personnel had gone on a trek to make an assessment of the formation of a lake at the place where the avalanche crashed into river Rishiganga on Sunday, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction.

A geologist with Hemavati Nandan Bahuguna University, Naresh Rana, had shared a video claiming that a lake had formed eight kilometres from Raini village and cautioned that it could lead to flash floods, though not of the magnitude of the disaster that struck on Sunday.

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NDRF personnel tried to fly a drone over the area but were not successful as the device malfunctioned and crashed a little distance away from here.

Meanwhile, the body of Basharat Ahmed Zargar, the General Manager of the Rishiganga hydroelectric project, was found as rescuers managed to reach the tunnel of the power plant on Friday.

Zargar, a resident of Srinagar in Jammu & Kashmir, had been working on the Rishiganga project for more than a year and was visiting the project site to oversee maintenance work at the project site when the disaster struck.

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The death toll of Sunday’s disaster touched 38 on Friday of which 11 have been identified. The rescuers have also recovered 18 body parts from different places in Chamoli district. DNA samples of all the dead bodies and body parts have been taken in a bid to establish their identity.

The last rites on 23 dead bodies and 10 body parts have been carried out as per religious practices as advised by a committee set up for the purpose, the police said.