In the Rudraprayag area of Uttarakhand, five pilgrims—three of them were from Gujarat—were killed on Thursday night after their automobile collided with the rubble of a landslide while they were traveling to Kedarnath.
On the Guptkashi-Gaurikund route, the landslide happened at Tarsali close to Phata and washed away a 60-meter section of the road. A car carrying pilgrims to the sacred Kedarnath temple was struck by a pile of rocks and boulders that fell off the mountain between Phata and Sonprayag.
The State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) started a rescue operation as soon as they learned about the tragedy, but rain made things difficult. When the weather cleared on Friday, five bodies were extracted from the car’s wreckage.
According to the authorities, the deceased have been named as Jigar R. Modi, Mahesh Desai, Parik Divyansh from Gujrat, Mintu Kumar, and Manish Kumar from Haridwar.
When the rescue effort resumed on Friday, the bodies and the wrecked Swift Dzire were rescued from the landslide rubble, according to Nandan Singh Rajwar, the district disaster management officer for Rudraprayag.
A man went missing in a landslide a few days ago, and numerous bridges were damaged, cutting off a significant portion of the population from the rest of the state. In the meantime, state chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami conducted a ground assessment of the rain-affected Kotdwar district.
In response to the nonstop rain, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had issued a “orange” advisory for heavy rain in six districts on Friday and a “red” alert for the following three days across the hill state.
Data from the State Emergency Operation Center shows that thus far during this monsoon, 58 people have died, 37 people have been injured, and 19 more are missing in various situations.
