Mandi, Himachal Pradesh: Rescue agencies yesterday continued their massive operation to search for the missing Hyderabad students and a tour operator by using a high-tech echo sounder device that scanned the Beas riverbed but failed to locate any bodies.
Twenty-four students from a Hyderabad engineering college and a tour operator were washed away in the Beas river last Sunday. Eight bodies have been found so far.
“We deployed side scan sonar to capture pictures of the riverbed to locate the bodies. It showed good images (of the riverbed) but no bodies were traced,” Jaideep Singh, commanding officer of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), said.
Almost 10km of the river stretch from the Pandoh dam to the upstream was scanned using the echo sounder. In the first four days of the operation, eight bodies were recovered. However, no body has been traced in the next three days.
Most of the bodies recovered, officials said, were either trapped under the rocks or buried in the riverbed silt within a three-km radius of the accident spot at Thalaut on the Chandigarh-Manali National Highway No.21.
“We can now go for the possibility to open the floodgates of the Pandoh dam so the water level in the reservoir is reduced drastically and the bodies, if trapped in boulders or stuck in the slit, come to the surface,” Telangana Home Minister Nayani Narasimha Reddy, who is camping here, said.
He said some parents of the missing students have apprehensions the bodies might wash away further if the water is allowed to go downstream. “But any decision in this regard will be taken with the consent of the parents,” he added.
The district administration Saturday sought the consent of about 25 parents and family members of the missing students to allow the administration to open the dam floodgates so the bodies, if stuck in the reservoir, could be fished out.
IANS
