[“There was chaos; the
roads were destroyed,” Mr. Bhatt recalled. “People were panic-stricken and
shouting for help.” Before his arrival, a cloudburst had created ravines
through the village and injured a few, including pilgrims who were returning
from the Gangotri pilgrimage center, higher up in the mountains.]
 |
Associated Press
Army soldiers rescuing a woman at Pindari
glacier in Uttarakhand, on Thursday.
|
Midway through, he had
to stop his class when Col. Ajay Kothiyal, the head of the institute, called an
emergency meeting. The instructors learned that flash floods had hit
Uttarakhand and that tens of thousands of pilgrims were spread across the state
visiting four major Hindu pilgrim centers — Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamnotri, and
Gangotri – which form the four stops of the Chota Char Dham pilgrimage in the
Himalayan state.
Colonel Kothiyal was
enlisting volunteers to join the operation to rescue people stranded across the
state. “People are stranded,” Colonel Kothiyal told the volunteers. “You need
to be prepared to make tracks, create temporary bridges to be able to pull them
out.” Mr. Bhatt, his fellow instructors, and a group of their current and
former students signed up that day.
Mr. Bhatt, who grew up
in Uttarakhand and knew its mountainous geography intimately, began mapping the
flooded areas in his mind. “We began to anticipate the kind of equipment we
would need, which road might be broken, which bridge might have collapsed,” he
said.
But as they prepared
themselves, the volunteers couldn’t foresee that the floods would kill more
than 1,000 people, and that around 100,000 would have to be rescued.
On June 18 , Mr. Bhatt
and his team started for Sainj village, carrying backpacks weighing almost 15
kilograms, or about 30 pounds, laden with ropes, anchors, pulleys, pitons and
other mountaineering equipment. After trekking nearly 20 kilometers, or about
12 miles, the team, which included a lone girl and boys as young as 17, reached
Sainj, a village of nearly 300, by early afternoon.
“There was chaos; the
roads were destroyed,” Mr. Bhatt recalled. “People were panic-stricken and
shouting for help.” Before his arrival, a cloudburst had created ravines
through the village and injured a few, including pilgrims who were returning
from the Gangotri pilgrimage center, higher up in the mountains.
A road passing by the
village had been washed off for half a kilometer. A large group of pilgrims was
stranded on the mountain slope across the road. “We had to create a makeshift
rope bridge to bring them over to our side,” Mr. Bhatt said. “The elderly
pilgrims were terrified of the rope bridge. Some of our men carried them on
their backs, while a few others were carried on stretchers.”
The volunteers led by
Mr. Bhatt rescued around 75 pilgrims from the Sainj village and its surrounding
area and accompanied them to the nearby Maneri helipad, where they were
airlifted.
Manoj Raturi, a
21-year-old mountaineer who had recently returned from a successful conquest of
Mount Everest, was a volunteer in Mr. Bhatt’s team.
“We were only worried
about the people who were stranded, not about our safety,” said Mr. Raturi, a
college student who hails from the Tehri district of Uttaranchal.
The team began its
second rescue operation after receiving instructions from Colonel Kothiyal, who
apprised them of locations where help was most needed.
Food and rest were
hard to come by for the next 10 days. The team members slept in the open,
curled into sleeping bags on forest clearings. At dawn, often hungry, they
continued their search for stranded pilgrims. “There were days when we went
without food,” Mr. Bhatt said.
They drank water from
creeks in the mountains and worked without a change of clothes.
Mr. Bhatt, who has
been a soldier in the Garhwal Scouts battalion of the Indian Army for 19 years,
led a team of 20. They successfully evacuated about 500 people in 10 days at
various points along a 100-kilometer stretch from Uttarkashi to Gangotri.
Another 100 volunteers
from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering were dispatched for rescue
operations. The combined effort saved an estimated 6,500 lives.
Mr. Bhatt, who climbed
the Mount Everest in 2001, is a veteran of rescue operations in the Himalayas.
“I have seen this before,” he said. Two years back, he recalled, he helped dig
the bodies of eight trekkers from under deep snow, almost a year after they had
died.
On June 23, a local
tourist guide informed Mr. Bhatt that a group of 46 foreign nationals were
stranded in the village of Sila Pilang, a seven-hour trek from where he was
located. The tourists had arrived from across the globe at an ashram,
associated with a yoga institute, located in a village about 16 kilometers
north of Uttarkashi for a two-week retreat.
Flash floods destroyed
the bridge over the Ganges River, which connected the ashram to a drivable
road. The local authorities were unable to send a rescue helicopter to the
ashram. The closest helipad was at Maneri, a few kilometers away.
“On Sunday we all left
the ashram in groups of eight and walked along a path in the mountains,” said
Richard Peterson, 60, an English teacher from California. There were 20 women
and 26 men in the yoga group.
“It was an
intimidating situation,” Mr. Peterson said. The trek was hard for the eight
women, he said, including his wife, Judith Peterson, who is in her 60s. Local
villagers helped them on their way to Sila Pilang, on the way to the helipad.
After trekking for
several hours Mr. Bhatt’s team reached the village to rescue the tourists. “The
women seemed pallid and terrified,” Mr. Bhatt said. The nearest road was far
away. The mountain tracks leading to the Maneri helipad were slippery. Mr. Bhatt
and his men guided the visitors for several hours until they reached the
helipad. “We had to walk across a river, walk on the side of the mountain,
cross over fallen trees,” recalled Mrs. Peterson. “It was very easy to break a
leg or injure oneself.
“It would have been
impossible without the help of the villagers and rescue workers who brought us
to the nearest helipad,” she added.
Mr. Bhatt, who lives
with his parents, wife, a 14-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter, spoke to
his family once during the rescue mission. Born in a village in Uttarkashi into
a family of farmers, he graduated high school before he joined the army with
his first posting in the army cantonment of Lansdowne, a small hill station in
Uttarakhand. He said that his family was used to him being away. “This is God’s
wish,” Mr. Bhatt said. “We only do our work.”
