Weather hinders rescue ops as death toll in Sikkim rises

Bad weather hampered efforts to reach the worst-hit areas of the Sikkim flash floods on Friday, forcing army and national disaster response force (NDRF) personnel to begin trekking and even taking boats to reach the devastated hillside villages, according to people aware of the matter

- Joydeep Thakur , Pramod Giri

The known number of casualties rose to 27 and the number of missing increased to 143, officials said, as fears strengthened that true scale of the loss, in material and life, may be worse than currently estimated.

The confirmed fatalities were all of bodies found floating in the Teesta river in Bengal’s Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling districts – hundreds of kilometres from Mangan in North Sikkim, which bore the brunt of Wednesday’s flash flooding.

“The bodies of 27 victims have been found in West Bengal districts so far. Of them, at least five are army personnel,” Shama Parveen, district magistrate of Jalpaiguri, told HT.

Around 1.30am on Wednesday, a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) triggered by torrential rain slammed into the Chungthang dam, cleaving the structure and barrelling downhill where it left villages and towns buried under silt and debris.