Sunday morning saw the start of rescue efforts to locate four laborers who had been stranded in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, for over 48 hours following an avalanche. Anil Kumar and Arvind Singh from Uttarakhand, Ashok from Uttar Pradesh, and Harmesh Chand from Himachal Pradesh have been identified as the four missing employees.
54 workers were buried beneath the snow at the Border Roads Organization (BRO) labor site at Mana village, around 5 kilometers from the Badrinath Temple, when an avalanche occurred on Friday. With the assistance of members of the Army, Air Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), 33 of them were rescued by Friday evening, and 17 on Saturday.
Four employees, however, passed away while receiving treatment: Manjit Yadav from Uttar Pradesh, Alok Yadav from Uttarakhand, and Mohindra Pal and Jitendra Singh from Himachal Pradesh.
The rescue effort was temporarily suspended for the past two nights due to heavy rain and snowfall. At an elevation of over 3,200 meters and with minimum temperatures as low as minus 12 degrees Celsius, relief workers are working at the avalanche site. was mostly conducted by Army and Air Force helicopters on Saturday since snow restricted the ability of vehicles to operate.
The rescue efforts are being carried out by more than 200 troops from the army, the disaster management authority, ITBP, BRO, NDRF, SDRF, IAF, district administration, health department, and fire department. Six helicopters are involved in the rescue effort: two Air Force helicopters, three Indian Army Aviation Corps helicopters, and an Army-hired civil helicopter. To find the missing employees, the authorities are also utilizing specialized RECCO radars, drones, and avalanche rescue dogs.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami also examined the relief and rescue efforts and conducted an airborne tour of the avalanche-affected area on Saturday. According to him, officers have been told to continue the search for the missing employees on a war footing.
One of the 54 workers living in containers close to Mana, Manoj Bhandari, claimed that when he woke up, a “mountain of snow” was sliding down from the summit. “I shouted to alert everyone and ran behind the loader machine parked nearby to save myself,” he said as he recalled the Uttarakhand avalanche.
Gopal Joshi, another employee, reported that the weather was just as severe as it had been in recent days. He claimed that everything happened quickly. “Snow was falling outside. The incident must have happened around 6 am. As soon as we came out of the container, we heard a loud thunder. When we looked towards the top, we saw a deluge of snow rolling towards us. I shouted to alert my companions and ran. There were already several feet of snow, due to which we could not run fast. After two hours, the soldiers of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police came to rescue us,” he said. According to Vipin Kumar, he spent almost fifteen minutes buried in snow.
