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7 trekkers go missing in Uttarakhand’s Rudraprayag, SDRF sends chopper for rescue
When the SDRF team received information from the District Control Room in Rudraprayag that seven trekkers were missing while trekking in Pandav Shera area and they needed to be rescued, a chopper was arranged from the Civil Aviation department for a quick rescue operation by SDRF’s senior officials.
Dehradun: Seven trekkers have gone missing on the Pandav Shera trek route in Uttarakhand’s Rudraprayag district at a height of around 4500 metres, officials said. The State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) has sent a High-Altitude Rescue team and a chopper to the area to launch a search and rescue operation on Saturday evening.
The seven trekkers who are from Uttarakhand were making a documentary in the Pandav Shera trekking area, Lalita Negi, media in-charge SDRF said.
“There has been no contact with them after Friday. Their last message through SMS was that they were at a height of 4,500 metres in injured condition and without any food or water left,” the SDRF official said.
When the SDRF team received information from the District Control Room in Rudraprayag that seven trekkers have gone missing while trekking in Pandav Shera area and they immediately needed to be rescued, a chopper was arranged from the Civil Aviation department for a quick rescue operation by SDRF’s senior officials.
“A High-Altitude Rescue Team of SDRF was dispatched to Pandav Shera area in the chopper from Sahastradhara Helipad in Dehradun with necessary rescue equipment and satellite phones for the quick rescue operation. The team has reached Agastyamuni helipad in Rudraprayag from where they will trek and start the rescue operation,” Negi said on Saturday.
This is not the first time trekkers have gone missing in the state. Many mountaineers and trekkers have even lost their lives in the hilly terrain of Uttarakhand, after they went missing or were caught in extreme weather events during mountaineering.
In June last year, the SDRF rescued two trekkers, including one foreigner from Slovenia (a country in Central Europe), from the Hemkund Ghangaria trek route in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. In October last year, rescuers recovered the bodies of four navy personnel who went missing during an avalanche on Mt Trishul at an altitude of 6,700 metres in Chamoli district. On September 24 last year, an expedition of the Indian Army out to scale Satopanth peak in Gangotri National Park, found the body of a mountaineer who was part of an expedition of the army sent to scale the same peak in 2005 in which a few mountaineers had gone missing. In July 2020, four trekkers went missing near Vasuki Tal area near Kedarnath. They were rescued after an extensive search operation of almost 48-hours by SDRF.
In September 2019, a 37-year-old Hungarian mountaineer Peter Wittek had gone missing during an expedition to the 7,120-metre-high Mount Trishul located in Garhwal Himalayas in Chamoli district. The missing mountaineer was part of the six-member Singaporean-Vietnamese-Hungarian-Mauritian mountaineering expedition to Mount Trishul between September 13 to October 8.
