More than 200 people were stranded in Himachal Pradesh's Lahaul-Spiti following a cloudburst and landslides earlier this week.
Additionally, a 707 national highway has also been shut in the state after a road was swept away by a landslide in Sirmaur's Paonta Sahib. Traffic has been diverted to a road passing through Uttarakhand's Vikasnagar from Kaffota.
A video clip on social media showed chunks of earth and rocks sliding down. A long section of the road is seen crumpling, being carried away be the debris from the mountainside.
According to the State Disaster Management Director Sudesh Kumar Mokhta in a statement said the stranded people could not be evacuated as sorties by helicopter could not be carried out due to bad weather.
Mokhta said of the 221 stranded in the district’s Udaipur, 191 are from parts of Himachal Pradesh while 30 are from seven other states.
Among the stranded, 13 are from Punjab, four from New Delhi, three each from Maharashtra and Odisha, two each from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and one each from Jharkhand, Karnataka and Ladakh.
Besides, 106 people are from Himachal Pradesh’s Kullu, 51 from Mandi, 12 from Chamba, nine from Bilaspur, five from Kangra, three from Shimla, two each from Solan and Sirmaur and one from Hamirpur.
Mokhta said three trekkers have also gone missing in the district. While one of them is from Rajasthan, the details of the other two are not known yet.
Meanwhile, a video has surfaced on the internet in which local villagers and members of the disaster rescue team were seen carrying an injured person across a raging Jahalman nallah in Lahaul-Spiti as the bridge was washed away due to the swift current.
Himachal Pradesh, which has witnessed numerous cloudbursts and landslides this year, is unlikely to get any respite from continuing bad weather in the coming days. The meteorological department has issued a fresh yellow weather warning for heavy rains in the hill state till August 3. Also, heavy rain may also occur in the plains and low and mid-hills of the state till August 5, a MeT department added.
The Shimla MeT Centre advised the public, especially the tourists, to not go near rivers and water bodies as the water level may increase any time due to heavy rains in the coming days.
It warned that landslides and uprooting of trees may also occur at some places.
