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3 soldiers and 8 porters buried under snow

Special Correspondent

Army battling avalanches in Jammu and Kashmir following heavy snowfall

— Photo: Nissar Ahmad

Frosty blanket: A snow-covered mountain overlooking the Dal Lake in Srinagar on Thursday after fresh snowfall.

NEW DELHI: The Army is battling avalanches following heavy snowfall in Jammu & Kashmir. Relief operations in a couple of incidents were hampered due to adverse weather. The latest incident took place on Thursday morning when a jawan was buried under snow outside a post in Machal sector.

In another major incident, almost an entire party of five soldiers and eight porters are feared to have died in an avalanche near a village on way to the Malanga Pass on Wednesday. Reports said two soldiers were rescued, but their condition was not known. A junior commanding officer and two soldiers along with the porters were buried under the snow when rescue operations were called off due to bad weather.

The avalanche occurred 7 km uphill from the Mohra Bridge, the site of a hydel project, and the blocked access routes have made rescue efforts difficult, said sources at the army headquarters here. In another incident, two soldiers were buried alive in Kupwara on the same day. The weather conditions here too are bad, inhibiting the transportation of the bodies of the two soldiers to Kerala, their native State.

Avalanche detectors

Officers said most posts did not have avalanche detectors. The Defence Research & Development Organisation, which has a specialised department to study avalanches, is in the processing of developing an import substitute for the purpose. In general, however, Army personnel at their posts are safe as the location is near villages where there is little possibility of avalanches.

In the Malanga pass incident, officers here said, either the avalanche was very huge to have wiped out the entire team or the soldiers might not have followed orders of walking in a single file while maintaining a distance from each other when traversing disaster prone areas. The Army also sends out patrols during inclement weather because militants take advantage of the low visibility to infiltrate in Jammu & Kashmir.

Highway blocked

Shujaat Bhukhari reports from Srinagar:

The northern parts of Kashmir witnessed heavy snowfall during the past three days.

Spokesman for the Srinagar-based 15 Corps headquarters Col. Manjinder Singh told The Hindu that helicopters were pressed into action for rescue. Continuous snowfall affected the rescue operation and the helicopters also could not be operated for sometime.

A number of labourers had been put on the job to clear the area, Col. Singh said.

Meanwhile, snow and landslips also blocked the 300-km Srinagar-Jammu national highway that links the Kashmir valley to the rest of India.

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