Flights resume after week, highway remains shut : The Tribune India

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Flights resume after week, highway remains shut

Vehicles ply after heavy snowfall in Srinagar; and stranded passengers at the bus stand in Jammu on Saturday. Tribune Photos

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, December 14

The air traffic to the Kashmir valley was restored on Saturday after it remained shut for seven consecutive days, while the only highway leading out of the region remained cut-off for a second consecutive day.

Thousands stuck in udhampur

Udhampur: Thousands of small and big vehicles remained stranded on various parts of the highway. Due to torrential rain, landslides have also been reported from various areas, including Ramban district, due to which the movement of traffic was affected
Men and machinery have been pressed into service by the administration to make the road traffic-worthy, but due to continuous rainfall, the labourers found it difficult to remove the debris from the highway. ocThe flight operations at the Srinagar international airport — the only civilian airport in the Kashmir valley — were resumed in the afternoon as visibility improved to more than 1000 metres for the first time in the last seven days.

A senior official at the airport said 13 flights scheduled to arrive in the morning were cancelled due to low visibility. “The visibility improved later in the day and the operations were resumed after 12 noon,” the official said.

It is for the first time since Saturday last week that flights arrived in the Kashmir valley as the airport operations remained suspended due to low visibility caused by dense fog.

The snowfall yesterday across the Kashmir valley has significantly improved the visibility as ot cleared the fog in the region.

It was the third spell of snowfall and fifth spell of precipitation since the first week of November, which have caused bitter winter cold in the region.

While the air services were resumed, the precipitation has led to the closure of the Srinagar-Jammu highway, the only road leading out of the Kashmir valley.

The 300-km highway remained closed for the second consecutive day as several landslides blocked the mountainous stretches of the highway in Ramban district, an official of the Traffic Department said.

The official said the highway, which was blocked yesterday due to several feet of snowfall at the Jawahar Tunnel, would be opened for vehicular traffic once the landslides were cleared.

In addition to the Srinagar-Jammu highway, the two roads leading out of the Kashmir valley — Srinagar-Leh highway and the Mughal road — are already shut due to accumulation of snow at high-altitude passes along their routes.

Meanwhile, the weather in the Kashmir valley is likely to remain dry for the next at least four days as the storm system which caused the snow yesterday has weakened. A fresh storm system is likely to affect the region from Wednesday.