Relief teams cut through silt and debris yesterday and rescued 20 workers who had been trapped in a tunnel for more than 24 hours after a torrential downpour in a remote Indian Himalayan region.
The construction workers, building a tunnel for a power project, were trapped underground when the exit was blocked following a storm on Sunday in Kullu district in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, 500km north of New Delhi.
"All 20 people have been saved as there was plenty of oxygen in the kilometer-long tunnel," A.K. Puri, director general of police, told reporters. "Rescue officials and locals used excavation machinery to dig through the mouth of the tunnel. Last night's rain made the excavation work easier."
A National Hydroelectric Power Corp official said the condition of the workers was fine.
"As these men have been without food for almost 30 hours, they have been administered glucose and will be kept under observation for some time," said NHPC's Gyan Bhadra.
Dozens of huts where the mostly migrant laborers lived in Barshaini village were washed away after the cloudburst which brought down tonnes of slush and boulders.
Meanwhile, 39 bodies were found floating in receding flood waters in eastern India, officials said yesterday, as the death toll from this season's monsoon rains across South Asia rose above 2,000.
The toll already is well above last year when 1,500 people were killed during the monsoon, which usually runs from June through September, though last year continued into October.
At least 1,191 people have died in India, 694 in Bangladesh, 124 in Nepal and five in Pakistan, bringing the toll to 2,014, according to figures supplied by authorities in each country and compiled by reporters. Victims have mostly died from drowning, mudslides and waterborne diseases.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS