Sudden floods in northern India kill at least 4, trapping others under the debris

Sudden floods have taken away several houses and shops in northern India, killing at least four people and leaving many other traps under the debris, officials announced on Tuesday.

Local television channels have shown that flooding water descended a mountain and crashed to Dharali, a Himalayan mountain village in the Uttarkashi district in the state of Uttarakhand. Flood water flooded houses, swept away the roads and destroys a local market.

“A dozen hotels have been swept away and several stores collapsed,” said Prashant Arya, an administrative officer, adding that the rescuers, including the Indian army and the police, were looking for the missing. The chief minister of Uttarakhand, Pushkar Singh Dhami, said that the rescue agencies were working “on a war foot”.

“We do everything possible to save lives and relieve,” he said in a statement.

The National Authority for the Management of India disasters said that he had asked three helicopters of the federal government to help rescue and rescue operations while rescuers had trouble accessing the distant field.

Officials did not provide figures for trapped or missed people.

The Meteorological Agency of India has planned more heavy rains in the region in the coming days. The authorities asked schools to stay closed in several districts, including Dehradun and Haridwar.

Sudden and intense showers on small areas known as clouds are increasingly common in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan region subject to sudden floods and landslides during the monsoon season. Cloud explosions have the potential to wreak havoc by causing intense floods and landslides, which has an impact on thousands of people in mountainous regions.

More than 6,000 people died and 4,500 villages were affected when a similar Cloudburst devastated the state of Uttarakhand in 2013.

Experts claim that Cloudbursts have increased in recent years due to climate change, while the damage caused by storms have also increased due to unforeseen development in mountain regions.

Flood in northern India is the last in a series of disasters that have beaten the Himalayan mountains, which have extended in five countries in recent months.

The floods and landslides following heavy rains and glaciers found due to high temperatures killed more than 300 people in Pakistan, the country’s disaster agency reported. In 2024, there was 167 disasters in Asia – in particular storms, floods, heat waves and earthquakes – which was most continent, according to the emergency database of events maintained by the University of Louvaine in Belgium. This has loss of more than $ 32 billion WE, The researchers found.

A 2023 report from Nepal International Center for Integrated Mountain Development revealed that glaciers melt at unprecedented rates in the Hindu mountain chains of Kush and Himalayas. The study revealed that at least 200 of the region’s more than 2,000 glacial lakes are at risk of overflow, which can cause downstream catastrophic damage.