Leh cloudburst: When water swept families away…

Najam-ul-Hassan, 48, has been searching through the slush and mud for more than two days to trace his sister’s family at Phayang village in Leh. Hassan, along with the villagers, managed to locate the bodies of three family members, but his brother-in-law and niece are still missing. With every passing hour, the chances of finding them, dead or alive, are reduced.

Emotional scenes were witnessed when a four-year-old niece of Hassan was retrieved from the debris of her house. The rescuers and onlookers could not hold back their tears as the body of a toddler was laid to rest along with her two sisters. 

“My sister’s family members were sleeping when sheets of water rushed into their house, washing away all those present and flattening the complex. Since then, we have been trying to locate the bodies. We have found three while two remain missing. We also decided to bury the dead even as we continue our search,” Hassan told DNA over telephone from Phayang village.

Hussain Ali, a soldier, had arrived in Phayang on Thursday evening to meet his family. But destiny had other plans.

“His house is located at the foothill of the mountain and when there was the cloudburst, he bravely attempted to take his family to a higher ground. But minutes later, gushing water swept his wife and three of his children away. He managed to hold on to his four-year-old son, and clung to a tree trunk till the water receded. Luckily, both survived but the others did not,” said Mohammad Suleiman, a relative of Ali. Such stories are just the tip of iceberg that has crushed the people in Leh. “Five villages Nimoo, Basgo, Shapoo, Phayang, and Ney villages, besides Leh town, were adversely affected,” said Kuldeep Khoda, J&K director general of police.

The affected areas stretch from the village of Pang on the Rohtang-Leh highway up to Nimmu on the Leh-Srinagar highway, a distance stretching more than 150 kilometers.

At a distance of 15 kilometres from Leh, Phayang was the worst hit by the flash floods triggered by the cloudburst. Phayang has a mixed population of Muslims and Buddhists, with around 700 families populating the village.

“There are more than six families in Fiang who are untraceable and we fear they are all dead. The village is flooded with water. There is no trace of the 500-year-old historic Imam Bara in Phayang,” said Abuzar Arman, a resident of Phayang village who was in Jammu when the floods occurred.

Suleiman also complained about the tardy state government efforts to help the victims. “There is no water, no food for us. The civil government is still missing. It is the local army unit that has come to our help,” he said.