At least 25 passengers, aged four to 51, were killed when a bus carrying 45 people to a wedding crashed into a 500-metre-deep gorge near Simri in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal district late Tuesday, police said, despite an overnight rescue operation.
The bus was travelling from Haridwar to Kadagaon in Pauri when it became unbalanced. The death toll from the accident was expected to rise because some of those injured were critically injured. “Twenty people have been rescued and rushed to medical facilities,” said Uttarakhand Police Chief Ashok Kumar.
District magistrate Vijay Kumar Jogdande said the rescue operation was underway and that the bodies were being extracted using ropes.
According to Manikant Mishra, commandant of the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), only six bodies have been removed from the accident site. “…the operation to transport the remaining bodies to a nearby road is underway.” Two to three of the rescued are seriously injured.”
SDRF in charge Lalita Negi stated that their teams were rushed to the scene from their camps in Srinagar, Kotdwar, Satpuli, and Rudrapur as soon as they were informed of the accident.
Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister, rushed to the State Disaster Management Centre at the secretariat to oversee rescue operations. He spoke with Jogdande and told him to speed up the rescue operation.
