Flash floods have killed more than 200 people and left scores of others missing in India and Pakistan, as rescuers brought to safety some 1600 people from two mountainous districts in the neighbouring countries.
In Pakistan, a helicopter carrying relief supplies to the flood-hit northwestern Bajaur crashed on Friday due to bad weather, killing all five people on board, including two pilots, a government statement said.
Sudden, intense downpours over small areas known as cloudbursts are increasingly common in India’s Himalayan regions and Pakistan’s northern areas, which are prone to flash floods and landslides.
Cloudbursts have the potential to wreak havoc by causing intense flooding and landslides, impacting thousands of people in the mountainous regions.
Experts say cloudbursts have increased in recent years partly because of climate change, while damage from the storms also has increased because of unplanned development in mountain regions.
In India-controlled Kashmir, rescuers searched for missing people in the remote Himalayan village of Chositi on Friday after flash floods a day earlier left at least 60 people dead and at least 80 missing, officials said.
Officials halted rescue operations overnight but rescued at least 300 people on Thursday after a powerful cloudburst triggered floods and landslides.
Officials said many missing people were believed to have been washed away.
Harvinder Singh, a local resident, joined the rescue efforts immediately after the disaster and helped retrieve 33 bodies from under mud, he said.
At least 50 seriously injured people were treated in local hospitals, many of them rescued from a stream filled with mud and debris.
Disaster management official Mohammed Irshad said the number of missing people could increase.
Weather officials forecast more heavy rains and floods in the area.
Chositi, in Kashmir’s Kishtwar district, is the last village accessible to motor vehicles on the route of an ongoing annual Hindu pilgrimage to a mountainous shrine at an altitude of 3,000 metres.
Officials said the pilgrimage, which began July 25 and was scheduled to end on September 5, was suspended.
The devastating floods swept away the main community kitchen set up for the pilgrims, as well as dozens of vehicles and motorbikes.
More than 200 pilgrims were in the kitchen at the time of the flood, which also damaged or washed away many of the homes clustered together in the foothills, officials said.
Sneha, who gave only one name, said her husband and a daughter were swept away as floodwater gushed down the mountain.
The two were having meals at the community kitchen while she and her son were nearby.
The family had come for a pilgrimage, she said.
Photos and videos on social media show extensive damage with household goods strewn next to damaged vehicles and homes in the village.
Authorities made makeshift bridges Friday to help stranded pilgrims cross a muddy water channel and used dozens of earthmovers to shift boulders, uprooted trees and electricity poles and other debris.
Kishtwar district is home to multiple hydro-electric power projects, which experts have long warned pose a threat to the region’s fragile ecosystem.
In northern and northwestern Pakistan, flash floods killed at least 164 people in the past 24 hours, including 78 people who died in the flood-hit Buner district in northwest Pakistan on Friday.
Dozens were injured as the deluge destroyed homes in villages in Buner, where authorities declared a state of emergency on Friday.
Ambulances have transported 56 bodies to local hospitals, according to a government statement.
The helicopter that crashed on Friday was on a relief mission when it went down in the northwest provincial chief minister Ali Amin Gandapur, said.
Rescuers evacuated 1300 stranded tourists from the mountainous Mansehra district hit by landslides on Thursday.
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