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India quake toll hits 91
Source: Agencies |
September 22, 2011, Thursday
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SOLDIERS in northeastern India cleared a path yesterday to a hydroelectric project where 17 people were confirmed killed by landslides in a powerful Himalayan earthquake, bringing the overall toll in the disaster to 91.
The magnitude-6.9 quake on Sunday evening claimed lives in northeastern India, Nepal and China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Rescue efforts have been hampered by heavy rain and mudslides that blocked the roads leading to villages in the remote, mountainous region.
Several of those slides hit the area around the hydroelectric plant being built along the Teesta, a glacier-fed river in the Himalayas in the northern part of India's Sikkim state.
A press statement from Teesta Urja Co, which is building the plant, said 10 workers were killed when their vehicles were buried during the quake by boulders dislodged from a hillside. Another seven were killed in a separate landslide.
Officials had earlier said that as many as 40 workers were unaccounted for.
The statement said that the company, with help from the army and paramilitary troops in the area, had begun transporting 10 injured workers to nearby hospitals. Mud and rocks blocking the roads to the plant had hampered rescue efforts.
P. P. Baby, a senior executive with the company, said the quake did not damage the plant, part of which is almost complete. "The dam and the power plant structures are completely safe," he said.
The deaths from the quake were spread across a wide swath of the Himalayan region, with officials reporting 60 dead in Sikkim alone. The toll was expected to rise as rescue workers gained access to remote villages in the sparsely populated region.
Troops have been airlifting rescuers and dropping food and supplies to the cutoff areas, but word on casualties and damage has been slow to come by.
Nearly 60 tourists, stranded in the popular mountain resort of Lachung, clambered onto army helicopters yesterday and were ferried to the nearest town of Mangan. "We've been waiting to be rescued," Kiran Palany, a Mumbai businessman, said. "It's been a harrowing three days."
Lachung is about 120 kilometers north of Gangtok, the Sikkim state capital.
The magnitude-6.9 quake on Sunday evening claimed lives in northeastern India, Nepal and China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Rescue efforts have been hampered by heavy rain and mudslides that blocked the roads leading to villages in the remote, mountainous region.
Several of those slides hit the area around the hydroelectric plant being built along the Teesta, a glacier-fed river in the Himalayas in the northern part of India's Sikkim state.
A press statement from Teesta Urja Co, which is building the plant, said 10 workers were killed when their vehicles were buried during the quake by boulders dislodged from a hillside. Another seven were killed in a separate landslide.
Officials had earlier said that as many as 40 workers were unaccounted for.
The statement said that the company, with help from the army and paramilitary troops in the area, had begun transporting 10 injured workers to nearby hospitals. Mud and rocks blocking the roads to the plant had hampered rescue efforts.
P. P. Baby, a senior executive with the company, said the quake did not damage the plant, part of which is almost complete. "The dam and the power plant structures are completely safe," he said.
The deaths from the quake were spread across a wide swath of the Himalayan region, with officials reporting 60 dead in Sikkim alone. The toll was expected to rise as rescue workers gained access to remote villages in the sparsely populated region.
Troops have been airlifting rescuers and dropping food and supplies to the cutoff areas, but word on casualties and damage has been slow to come by.
Nearly 60 tourists, stranded in the popular mountain resort of Lachung, clambered onto army helicopters yesterday and were ferried to the nearest town of Mangan. "We've been waiting to be rescued," Kiran Palany, a Mumbai businessman, said. "It's been a harrowing three days."
Lachung is about 120 kilometers north of Gangtok, the Sikkim state capital.
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