When Everest Climbers Became Rescue Men

Associated Press Army soldiers rescuing a woman at Pindari glacier in Uttarakhand, on Thursday.

NEW DELHIâ€" On the morning of June 17, Prakash Bhatt, a 36-year-old soldier in the Indian Army and an instructor at the government-run Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in Uttarkashi in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, was teaching a class. Mr. Bhatt is one of the 10 soldiers on a three-year assignment to the mountaineering institute, which trains mountaineering enthusiasts and provides lessons in search and rescue operations.

Midway through, he had to stop his class when Col. Ajay Kothiyal, the head of the institute, called an emergency meeting. The instrutors learned that flash floods had hit Uttarakhand and that tens of thousands of pilgrims were spread across the state visiting four major Hindu pilgrim centers â€" Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamnotri, and Gangotri - which form the four stops of the Chota Char Dham pilgrimage in the Himalayan state.

Colonel Kothiyal was enlisting volunteers to join the operation to rescue people stranded across the state. “People are stranded,” Colonel Kothiyal told the volunteers. “You need to be prepared to make tracks, create temporary bridges to be able to pull them out.” Mr. Bhatt, his fellow instructors, and a group of their current and former students signed up that day.

Mr. Bhatt, who grew up in Uttarakhand and knew its mountainous geography intimately, began mapping the flooded areas in his mind. “We began to anticipate the kind of equipment we would need, which road might be broken, which bridge might have collapsed,” he said.

But as they prepared the! mselves, the volunteers couldn’t foresee that the floods would kill more than 1,000 people, and that around 100,000 would have to be rescued.

On June 18 , Mr. Bhatt and his team started for Sainj village, carrying backpacks weighing almost 15 kilograms, or about 30 pounds, laden with ropes, anchors, pulleys, pitons and other mountaineering equipment. After trekking nearly 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, the team, which included a lone girl and boys as young as 17, reached Sainj, a village of nearly 300, by early afternoon.

“There was chaos; the roads were destroyed,” Mr. Bhatt recalled. “People were panic-stricken and shouting for help.” Before his arrival, a cloudburst had created ravines through the village and injured a few, including pilgrims who were returning from the Gangotri pilgrimage center, higher up in the mountains.

A road passing by the village had been washed off for half a kilometer. A large group of pilgrims was stranded on the mountain slope across the road. “We had to create a makeshift rope bridge to bring them over to our side,” Mr. Bhatt said. “The elderly pilgrims were terrified of the rope bridge. Some of our men carried them on their backs, while a few others were carried on stretchers.”

The volunteers led by Mr. Bhatt rescued around 75 pilgrims from the Sainj village and its surrounding area and accompanied them to the nearby Maneri helipad, where they were airlifted.

Courtesy of Nehru Institute of Mountaineering A rescue operation being conducted by volunteers of the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in Uttarakhand.

Manoj Raturi, a 21-year-old mounta! ineer who! had recently returned from a successful conquest of Mount Everest, was a volunteer in Mr. Bhatt’s team.

“We were only worried about the people who were stranded, not about our safety,” said Mr. Raturi, a college student who hails from the Tehri district of Uttaranchal.

The team began its second rescue operation after receiving instructions from Colonel Kothiyal, who apprised them of locations where help was most needed.

Food and rest were hard to come by for the next 10 days. The team members slept in the open, curled into sleeping bags on forest clearings. At dawn, often hungry, they continued their search for stranded pilgrims. “There were days when we went without food,” Mr. Bhatt said.

They drank water from creeks in the mountains and worked without a change of clothes.

Mr. Bhatt, who has been a soldier in the Garhwal Scouts battalion of the Indian Army for 19 years, led a team of 20. They successfully evacuated about 500 people in 10 days at various points alog a 100-kilometer stretch from Uttarkashi to Gangotri.

Another 100 volunteers from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering were dispatched for rescue operations. The combined effort saved an estimated 6,500 lives.

Mr. Bhatt, who climbed the Mount Everest in 2001, is a veteran of rescue operations in the Himalayas. “I have seen this before,” he said. Two years back, he recalled, he helped dig the bodies of eight trekkers from under deep snow, almost a year after they had died.

On June 23, a local tourist guide informed Mr. Bhatt that a group of 46 foreign nationals were stranded in the village of Sila Pilang, a seven-hour trek from where he was located. The tourists had arrived from across the globe at an ashram, associated with a yoga institute, located in a village about 16 kilometers north of Uttarkashi for a two-week retreat.

Flash floods destroyed the bridge over the Ganges River, which connected the ashram to a drivable road. The local authorities were unable to send a ! rescue he! licopter to the ashram. The closest helipad was at Maneri, a few kilometers away.

“On Sunday we all left the ashram in groups of eight and walked along a path in the mountains,” said Richard Peterson, 60, an English teacher from California. There were 20 women and 26 men in the yoga group.

“It was an intimidating situation,” Mr. Peterson said. The trek was hard for the eight women, he said, including his wife, Judith Peterson, who is in her 60s. Local villagers helped them on their way to Sila Pilang, on the way to the helipad.

After trekking for several hours Mr. Bhatt’s team reached the village to rescue the tourists. “The women seemed pallid and terrified,” Mr. Bhatt said. The nearest road was far away. The mountain tracks leading to the Maneri helipad were slippery. Mr. Bhatt and his men guided the visitors for several hours until they reached the helipad. “We had to walk across a river, walk on the side of the mountain, cross over fallen trees,” recalled Mrs. Peteson. “It was very easy to break a leg or injure oneself.

“It would have been impossible without the help of the villagers and rescue workers who brought us to the nearest helipad,” she added.

Mr. Bhatt, who lives with his parents, wife, a 14-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter, spoke to his family once during the rescue mission. Born in a village in Uttarkashi into a family of farmers, he graduated high school before he joined the army with his first posting in the army cantonment of Lansdowne, a small hill station in Uttarakhand. He said that his family was used to him being away. “This is God’s wish,” Mr. Bhatt said. “We only do our work.”