Raging muddy waters and shaking ground is all that Uttarakhand survivors remember

The survivors of Sunday’s Uttarakhand glacier breach, which completely washed away two power plants and left 10 dead and around 140 missing, recount with horror the booming sound of the gushing water, ground shaking below their feet and mud and rubble all around them.

“There was a cloud of dust as the water went by. The ground shook like an earthquake,” local inhabitant Om Agarwal told a TV channel.

The flash flood at 10.45 am on Sunday in the Dhauli Ganga, Rishi Ganga and Alaknanda rivers — all inter-linked tributaries of the Ganga — triggered large-scale devastation in the hilly terrain. The flooding was caused by a breach in the Nand Devi glacier that released water which went gushing down the mountain

As visuals of a muddied survivor being pulled out of rubble by ITBP jawans emerged from Uttarkhand, the enormity of the tragedy glared everyone in the face. Images from the tragedy site show rubble and mud everywhere and no sign of the power project that was commissioned in 2020.

“Before we could make out what was happening, the raging muddy waters of Rishi Ganga had devastated the landscape,” says 50-year-old Dharam Singh, a resident, reports PTI.

The scenes brought back to the people horrifying memories of the 2013 Kedarnath deluge that killed 6000 people.

A Tapovan project worker, who was in a tunnel when the tragedy struck, said that God had saved him. “God has saved me… we were working inside a tunnel and got no time to respond. I was saved as I hooked myself into one corner,” he said, according to agencies.

Most of the missing were workers at two power plants that were battered by the deluge, caused by a huge chunk of glacier that slipped off a mountainside further upstream, said the police chief Ashok Kumar.