Rana was lucky. He saw the disaster unfold from above in the village of Raini, where he was building a new railroad for the Hyderabad-based Rithwik Railway Company. But several of his co-workers below failed to see the danger on the way.
Those from the highest point of view shouted to warn them.
“The five or six people who heard them ran. Some people were saved,” said Rana.
The rest are among the nearly 200 people who are still missing after part of a glacier collapsed on Sunday in northern India’s Uttarakhand state, causing a massive avalanche that tore through a mountain pass and hit a dam.
Authorities were able to rescue a handful of individuals immediately after the disaster, and another 126 people from neighboring Niti Valley were rescued by helicopter.
Three days after the tragedy, the search for survivors continues. So far, the bodies of 32 people have been found – and as the clock keeps ticking, hope is waning for those who have yet to be found.
A handful of villages in the remote region, where roads are few and far between, are now isolated from the outside world, including Rana’s house in Pan, where his wife is imprisoned.
It is not exactly clear what caused the piece of the glacier to fall, triggering the avalanche. India’s Interior Minister Amit Shah told parliament that a landslide triggered an “avalanche of snow” that spread across 14 square kilometers (5 square miles), causing flash floods.
Manish Mehta, a senior scientist at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, who is inspecting the site with four colleagues, said preliminary evidence shows that a “huge rock slide” near the glacier could be responsible for triggering the avalanche. The scale of the flash flood that followed was unprecedented, he added, and could affect “more than 100 square kilometers (38 square miles).”
Dr. Dan Shugar, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Calgary, said in a tweet on Tuesday that the analysis “suggests a landslide that destroyed part of a suspended glacier”.
“The glacier that we think has collapsed is a very steep suspended glacier. It is not a typical valley glacier, with a low gradient / slope, which sometimes has lakes at the end,” said Shugar, adding that the landslide probably contained rocks and glacier ice. “It went down a steep slope and probably disintegrated when it hit the valley floor.”
As the ice melts, the glaciers become unstable and begin to recede. A 2019 study found that Himalayan glaciers are melting twice as fast as in the last century, losing almost half a meter (1.6 feet) of ice each year.
Others point to construction along the state’s rivers, which in recent years has seen an increasing number of hydroelectric dams, interconnection projects and infrastructure, such as roads and new developments.
Dozens of workers who built a series of underground tunnels for a new plant near the dam were arrested by Sunday’s avalanche, including Virendra Kumar Gautam. That day, around 11 am, he and his team heard screams outside the tunnel, telling them to evacuate.
He ordered his team to move. After traveling about 50 meters (164 feet), Gautam recalled, “suddenly a flood came in, the glacier and water came in full force”.
Gautam and the others climbed emergency stairs embedded in the walls. The tunnel section was only 4.5 meters (14.5 feet) high, but the water quickly reached about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) high.
“I kept helping people to climb and saying that they would survive and shouldn’t worry, everything would be fine,” he said.
Gautam was right. The water level suddenly dropped, he said, making it shallow enough for the group to pass and climb about 350 meters (1,150 feet) up the emergency stairs to the surface.
Gautam said it took his team about 90 minutes, but they finally made it safely.
Others were not so lucky, however. People are still trapped in the tunnels, and officials say those inside may not have survived unless the wreckage somehow blocked the water and left enough air in the tunnels for men to breathe.
Vidhyadhar Maletha, an employee of the Prithak company who oversees the rescue efforts, said the four side tunnels and the main tunnel are all littered with debris.
He said they cleared about 90 meters (295 feet) of rubble, and the height of the tunnel dropped from 25 to 30 meters (82 to 98 feet). But mud and stones are still blocking the way.
“There is a lot of debris,” said Maletha.
CNN’s Helen Regan, Esha Mitra, Manveena Suri, Swati Gupta, Radina Gigova and Vedika Sud contributed to this report