In a life-and-death race against time, teams from the Indian Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police are working to save 24 workers who are feared trapped beneath the ice after a devastating glacier avalanche hit a Border Roads Organisation (BRO) project site at Mana village in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district at around 5 a.m. on Friday (February 28, 2025).
Of the 57 civilian workers at the site, 10 were rescued by the Army, and 23 are believed to be safe; continuous snowfall forces repeated halts in rescue operation; Met Dept warns of possibility of more avalanches
Also read: 22 missing after avalanche hits village in Uttarakhand
Chamoli district’s Disaster Response Officer Nandkishore Joshi said that the workers had been sleeping inside a couple of containers when the avalanche hit their sheds. The victims include the construction workers as well as JCB drivers and other machine operators.
The rescue operations were forced to stop multiple times during the day due to the extreme weather conditions, with continuous snow and rainfall in the upper reaches of the Himalayas, including at Mana. The India Meteorological Department has issued an advisory on the snowfall and the possibility of further avalanches in mountainous districts, along with the precautionary measures to be taken.
