At least 68 people are still missing in the murderous flood that swept a town last week in the Indian Himalayas, local authorities announced on Tuesday.
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They now identify 68 disappeared people, including 44 Indians and 22 Nepalese. Nine soldiers appear on the list.
Rescue officials indicated Tuesday that they were looking for bodies in the rubble of the tourist town of Dharali, in the Indian State of Uttarakhand (North).
Gambir Singh Chauhan, of the National Intervention Force in the event of a disaster (NDRF), said that sniff dogs had identified several sites indicating the presence of a body.
“When the excavations started, water sprang from the ground,” he said.
The authorities had declared shortly after the disaster that the flood had been caused by an intense rain downpour.
But experts evaluating the damage believe that the downpour was only the final trigger, which was added to sustained and prolonged rainy days which had already soggy and softened the soil.
The Himalayan glaciers, which provide essential water to nearly two billion people, melted faster than ever because of global warming, exposing populations to unpredictable and expensive disasters, warn scientists.
The softening of the permafrost (or permafrost, part of the soil of frozen permanently for at least two consecutive years) increases the risk of landslides.
For PK Joshi, expert in the Himalayan dangers at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, it seems that the flood was caused by the collapse of a heap of rock debris, called a moraine, which held a lake of cast iron from a glacier.