|
|
Hope walks into despair in Leh Hope followed despair into Leh today as the city’s bruised lifelines — the Leh-Kargil and Leh-Manali highways — were thrown open for traffic for the first time since the flash floods of August 5 and 6 devastated the slumbering city. Only yesterday, the sudden downpour alarmed the residents, who just abandoned their houses and rushed to the hilltops for safety. As a result, the surrounding roads - cleared by the Army and civil authorities after much hard work - were jammed for over three hours as the entire city scrambled to reach a safe place. “We can’t afford to take chances. We saw the flood coming again and ran for cover towards the mountains. All of us were out there,” said Sangten, a tourist operator, who drove his family of five “out of the danger zone”. But this morning, as hope dawned upon the city, Sangten accompanied his Sikh friend Daljit, who hit the just-opened Leh-Kargil highway along which stands the revered Gurdwara Pathar Sahib that faced an onslaught of slush on the day of the tragedy. Today, the gurdwara welcomed several locals - all praying for calm to return.Some measure of normalcy was evident around the city, as the Army ran trial runs of its convoys to test the robustness of the rebuilt Leh-Manali road, which saw the first stock of civil supplies coming into the ravaged area. On the Leh-Kargil-Srinagar highway, too, civil administration ran vehicles to secure the urgently needed reconstruction material and basic supplies. There is learnt to be a 70 per cent shortage of routine household items, including groceries and vegetables, with the shops awaiting a refill after people bought off everything following the floods. That the city opened up to the world from both sides -Srinagar on one and Himachal on the other -was a happy sign, a harbinger of hope for close to 1,500 homeless people camping at six-odd relief sites being run by the administration and Army. They continue to subsist on ready-to-eat packets from a community kitchen. Over 500 persons are still missing, their bodies feared trapped under the slush, which is now drying up and turning into clay mounds that the Army is finding hard to break. “I heard the roads have opened up. We can now get some supplies and cook our own food,” Tsering Dolma, 45, though she still doesn’t have the courage to return home to Choglumsar, the worst affected village of Leh. As for the roads, it took the Army and Border Roads Organisation nine days of day and night work to accomplish its first priority after the floods - the road restoration. On the Kargil axis, they fixed seven bridges, while on the Manali side they created an 80-km detour to beat a critical portion of the highway, which the landslides had blocked. The civil administration, on the other hand, is finding it hard to cope with the aftermath of the tragedy. It is still in denial about the extent of losses with Deputy Commissioner Angchuk pointing out: “Everything is fine.” Officially, the list of dead in Ladakh today crossed 200 with Army disclosing 10 casualties; it has reported 28 missing personnel of which three bodies have been recovered.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Letters | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
