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Unusually heavy rain and melting glaciers have brought deadly
flash floods to the mountains of India and neighboring Pakistan
and Nepal over the past year or two with government officials
increasingly blaming climate change.
Television footage from India's Himachal Pradesh state showed
houses flattened by landslide, buses and cars hanging on the
edge of precipices after roads gave way, and hundreds of people
at rescue sites as emergency workers struggled to clear debris.
"Again, tragedy has befallen Himachal Pradesh, with continuous
rainfall over the past 48 hours," the state's chief minister,
Sukhvinder Singh, said in a post on the messaging platform X,
formerly known as Twitter.
"Reports of cloudbursts and landslides have emerged from various
parts of the state resulting in loss of precious lives and
property."
Reports of more casualties kept coming in on Monday as the chief
minister inspected some of the damage.
In one the most deadly incidents, a temple collapsed in the
state capital, Shimla, with rescuers pulling out at least nine
bodies, the chief minister said.
Schools and other educational institutes had been ordered to
close and people in danger were being moved to safety in
shelters, state officials said.
Parts of the state had received as much as 273 mm (10.75 inches)
of rain in 24 hours, the India Meteorological Department said.
"This is the first time we're seeing multiple cloudburst
incidents and widespread damage in the state," said state
disaster management official Praveen Bhardwaj.
In the Solan district, houses collapsed after a cloudburst,
killing at least seven people, and a mother and her child were
killed in the Mandi district when their house collapsed,
Bhardwaj said.
(Reporting by Shivam Patel in New Delhi; editing by Robert
Birsel)
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