NEW DELHI: With more buildings developing cracks in Joshimath, the Army has been put on standby for rescue and relief operations. This is apart from a team of the National Disaster Response Force and four teams of the State Disaster Response Force that have already been deployed on the ground.
The total count of subsidence-affected homes rose to 678 on Monday while 27 more families were evacuated. In all, 82 families have been shifted to safe locations in the town. Hundreds of cross marks in red on structures indicating those declared unsafe gave a sense of the enormity of the crisis. Many are still staying in their unsafe houses.
Joshimath is important from a strategic perspective as it is about 100 km from the Line of Actual Control with China. Sources attributed the subsistence to the use of silent explosives by construction workers. “To avoid attention, silent explosives were used by construction workers, which accentuated the problem,” they said.
“The cracks seen on ground are dotted on an arc, moving north to south and the water emerging out of the cracks is dirty,” they pointed out. While big cracks appeared in last 15 days, it had begun after the flashfloods in Raini village of Chamoli district in February 2021,” they said.