Himachal Pradesh, officials said. Locals have estimated that there can be 21 bodies at the site, DS Rajput 14 NDRF second in command was quoted as saying by ANI, even as rescue operations continued on Wednesday.
The death toll due to rain-related incidents stood at 55 in the state on Tuesday. The state in unlikely to get respite from the heavy rains, with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecasting heavy to very heavy rainfall and issued a red alert for Wednesday. All schools and colleges in the state would remain closed for the day. On Tuesday, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu held a meeting to review the prevailing condition in the state and pressed that the state government is fully committed to expediting restoration efforts on a priority basis.
Meanwhile, in another rain-ravaged hill state, Uttarakhand, two more bodies were recovered on Tuesday while seven people are still missing. The body of a woman, who went missing after water from rain-fed Pawar gushed into villages in Uttarkashi district, was found on Tuesday while a 14-year-old girl’s body was found from a swollen stream in the Lakshman Jhula area of Rishikesh
Around 70 pilgrims stranded on the trek route to Madmaheshwar temple in Uttarakhand’s Rudraprayag district were safely evacuated on Wednesday with the help of a helicopter and SDRF personnel, while efforts were underway to rescue over 80 devotees still stuck at the spot, officials said. More than 200 pilgrims got stranded on the route on Monday when a bridge at Bantoli in Gaundar village broke down following heavy rains.
While 52 of them were rescued with the help of ropes by SDRF personnel by Tuesday evening, 70 more were rescued on Wednesday morning in a helicopter, he said. A total of 122 pilgrims have been rescued so far and it is hoped the rest will be rescued by the afternoon, Ukhimath Sub Divisional Magistrate Jitendra Verma said.
If the weather continues to be clear all the pilgrims will be rescued by this afternoon, he said, adding adequate food items have been made available at the Madmaheshwar temple to take care of stranded pilgrims and a medical team besides a police sub-inspector have been deputed at the spot. (PTI)
Not all instances of very heavy rainfall, however, are cloudbursts. A cloudburst has a very specific definition: Rainfall of 10 cm or more in an hour over a roughly 10 km x 10 km area is classified as a cloudburst event. By this definition, 5 cm of rainfall in a half-hour period over the same area would also be categorised as a cloudburst.
To put this in perspective, in a normal year, India, as a whole, receives about 116 cm of rainfall over the entire year. This means if the entire rainfall everywhere in India during a year was spread evenly over its area, the total accumulated water would be 116 cm high. There are, of course, huge geographical variations in rainfall within the country, and some areas receive over 10 times more than that amount in a year. But on average, any place in India can be expected to receive about 116 cm of rain in a year.
