Reaching Dharali means climbing mountains and crossing a disaster

A week after flash floods devastated Dharali in Uttarkashi’s Harsil valley, the destruction is still everywhere you look. Villages remain cut off, roads have vanished, and bridges lie twisted in the river.

Team Newslaundry, including Hridayesh Joshi and Ashish Anand, hiked through landslide debris, crossed broken mountain trails, and waded through damaged roads to try to reach the disaster zone. With every access road washed away, reaching Dharali meant clambering over rockfalls and navigating steep, unstable slopes.

In places, nearly 15 feet of rubble now clogs the riverbank and road. Iron bridges that once connected villages have been ripped apart and swept downstream. The roaring Khir Ganga river, carrying massive loads of debris, shows just how ferocious the flood must have been – this, 20 km from Dharali itself.

We saw first-hand entire stretches of road erased, replaced by mounds of rock and silt.

Some scenes were a reminder of the 2021 Rishiganga dam disaster and the Joshimath land subsidence, both of which Newslaundry reported from the ground. 

Newslaundry earlier reported on how locals found themselves excluded from rescue operations, on why experts think it’s not the usual cloudburst, on cracks in planning in an ecosensitive zone, and on families remaining incommunicado. That is the kind of independent, ad-free reporting subscribers make possible. 

Stay tuned for more updates from Uttarkashi and power our reportage.