Landslide hits Indian village, 150 may be trapped

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

NEW DELHI (AP) — A landslide hit a village in western India following torrential rains Wednesday, sweeping away scores of houses and raising fears that more than 150 people could be trapped, officials said.

Federal rescue workers were being hampered by continuing rains and poor roads leading to the village of Ambe in Pune district in Maharashtra state, where the landslide buried about 40 houses, said local commissioner Prabhakar Deshmukh.

"Reaching the exact space is taking time because there is a lot of damage to the road," Sandeep Rai Rathore, a top official of the federal National Disaster Response Force, told NDTV news channel.

Police and medical teams arrived in the area but had difficulty communicating because of poor telephone and cellphone connectivity, local legislator Dilip Walse Patil told CNN-IBN TV network.

FULL short story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140730/as--india-landslide-cadec6c951.html

[LeftishBrit]

1. Awful. I hope they will be rescued soon, and will be OK.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Is India's construction boom behind Pune village landslide?

Environmental experts are blaming the flattening of hilly slopes for agriculture and a construction boom for Wednesday morning's landslide that has claimed at least 30 lives and buried up to 200 people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

The mostly tribal population in these regions has traditionally grown a single crop of rice or finger millet, but in recent years the focus has shifted to wheat cultivation, says Saili Palande-Datar, an environmentalist with Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group.
...
Malin village, the site of the disaster, is located close to the backwaters of the Dimbhe dam, constructed a decade ago, and experts say areas adjoining backwaters of dams are usually landslide-prone.
...
But she adds that "as a policy, the government is helping expansion of areas under traditional padkai (terrace farming) in the tribal belts. Earlier, the tribals used stones to support terraces, but these days big machines are used to level the ground. The presence of loose mud and absence of any reinforcement or water channels is a recipe for disaster."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-28579668