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Himachal villagers evacuate amid threats of flash flood
Thousands have fled homes amid fears that a lake in China will burst its banks and flood across border.
Thousands of villagers in Himachal Pradesh have evacuated amid fears that a lake in China will burst its banks and flood across the border, officials said on Tuesday.
The threat of flash flooding comes amid South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in 15 years that has killed more than 1,700 people.
The lake has formed behind a landslide late last month that blocked the Pareechu River, a tributary of the River Sutlej in Tibet, satellite images show.
China has ruled out controlled blasting of the landslip to allow the water to gradually drain because of the area's mountainous terrain, the officials said.
Eight villages on the banks of the Sutlej in Himachal Pradesh, around 370 km north of Delhi, have been evacuated and 350 more villagers are threatened by floods.
Power supplies to the northern states have been disrupted as one of the three power plants at risk from flash floods has been partially shut down.
"About a thousand people living downstream of the Sutlej... have been moved to safer areas," state Irrigation Minister Vidya Stokes said.
In 2000, a flash flood on the Sutlej killed more than 70 people and damaged around 100 bridges.
State Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh said that the government and armed forces were keeping an hourly watch on water levels.
"The state administration is keeping a round-the-clock watch on the situation and people have been advised to move to higher reaches in the mountains," he said.
Bad weather and rugged mountain terrain have hampered efforts to find a way out of the mounting crisis on the Pareechu river, which flows into the Sutlej valley.
HK Sharma, director of the Nathpa Jhakri Hydel Project downstream from the lake, said negotiations were underway with Chinese authorities.
"A team of flood experts is awaiting permission from China in order to survey the Pareechu lake area and update the threat perception," he said.
"Recent satellite imagery has shown an increase in the lake area from 150 hectares on Aug 6 to 188 hectares on Tuesday."
Power generation has been partly suspended at the Nathpa Jhakri project, which supplies around a third of the power to the northern grid, because of the threat of the floodwaters, and the Rajiv Gandhi and Karcham-Wangtu projects are also at risk.
