Uttarakhand flash floods: Rising river waters delay rescue efforts

Surging waters in the Dhauliganga river on Thursday forced a brief pause on the rescue efforts to reach out to the 37 persons trapped inside a tunnel of the NTPC hydel power project Tapovan since Sunday’s flash floods triggered by an avalanche.

Rescue operations hit a roadblock on Wednesday night as the cleared part of the tunnel at the 520MW under construction NTPC plant kept getting filled with slush from other underground tunnels of the run-of-the-river project.

Read | Uttarakhand floods: Drilling operation at Tapovan tunnel continues; families get impatient

In a change in strategy, the rescue efforts were focused on drilling vertically to “peep into a tunnel” 12 meters below continuing to search for signs of life below the massive debris brought by a flash flood on Sunday left a trail of death and despair in this Himalayan town.

As water levels surged, rescue operations were stopped for about 30 minutes and resumed after receiving an “all clear” signal from a team monitoring the site where the avalanche had hit the river Rishiganga about nine kms upstream from Tapovan. ITBP officials flew drones to look for possible hurdles in the flow of the river that could lead to a sudden surge in the waters.

Meanwhile, a search was launched to look for missing persons along the river banks from Joshimath to Gauchar, about 90 km downstream, as the torrent of debris washed away power projects, bridges and temples that came in the way.

Uttarakhand floods live updates on DH

According to officials, 35 bodies have been recovered since Sunday’s flash floods and 169 persons remain missing – most of them engaged at the NTPC project site Tapovan and at the smaller Rishiganga project about nine km upstream near Raini village. Anxious relatives continued to throng the project site looking for information about their near and dear ones missing in the disaster.

Uttarakhand Governor Baby Rani Maurya had to face the ire of the relatives who broke down before her and sought speeding up of rescue efforts. “We are making every effort to search for those who are missing,” Maurya told reporters at the project site Tapovan.