Himachal avalanche: Massive operation on to locate five missing soldiers

With the weather clearing up on Saturday following days of snowfall, a massive search operation was conducted for five soldiers reported missing in the snow-bound Himalayan terrain of Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district where an avalanche hit them earlier this week, officials said.

"The search teams are trying hard to dig up the snow mounds spread over a large area, but they haven't been successful," said a civil administration official associated with the search operation.

"Some portions of the snow containing the debris have turned into hard rocks, making it difficult to dig further," he said, adding even sniffer dogs proved ineffective.

The officials says the possibility of survival of those trapped in the snow was very slim as the searches entered the fourth day.

Some local mountaineers are also involved in the operation.

"Rescuing the survivors in avalanches at such a height is really a herculean job. The sense and smelling power of dogs reduces in such conditions. Even for humans, staying for a longer duration with temperatures plummeting below minus 10 degrees Celsius is very difficult," said a rescuer.

"The searchers have zeroed in on a 200-sq-feet area that they believe is the main spot where the soldiers might have been buried. But frequent spells of snowfall and avalanches had increased the height of snow mounds," he added.

An avalanche on February 20 was triggered when the glacier near Namgia Dogri bordering Tibet slid, burying six soldiers of the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles when 16 of them were on a routine patrol.

Body of a soldier was found later. Five Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) troopers were also injured in the disaster.

The state government said two separate parties of the Army and the ITBP were patrolling at Namgia Dogri when the avalanche hit.

Earlier, blizzard conditions, high-speed winds, fresh snowfall and poor visibility had severely hampered the rescue operations, an Indian Army spokesperson told IANS.

Meanwhile, the movement on the national highway between Pooh and Karcham in Kinnaur (NH-5) continued to be hampered due to rock falls and snow slides.

The General Reserve Engineer Force (GREF), a wing of the Border Roads Organisation, has been deployed to clear the road, officials said.

The disaster spot is some 350 km from the state capital.

--IANS

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