‘Saved ourselves by taking shelter in jungle at night’ | India News

DEHRADUN: Shanti Panwar, 45, vividly remembers the night of August 19, when flash floods, triggered by heavy rain, wreaked havoc in her village in Raipur area of Dehradun district. Her family members, 15 of them spanning three generations, had lived together in their two-storey house for years. A large part of it is now under the debris.
“Around 11:30 pm, water started gushing towards our house from the hilltop. An hour later, it became very forceful. We were scared, especially for our children, and somehow reached higher ground,” said Shanti, a resident of the disaster-hit Sarkhet village near Maldevta, about 20km away from Dehradun city centre.
“Everything happened so fast. I was neck deep in water. In front of my house, the swollen Song river was flowing at a ferocious speed. I could see people trembling with fear,” said Rajni PawarShanti’s sister-in-law.
The family had five cows, two of which were washed away and three buried alive. The ground floor is filled with debris and elders decided to shift the children to a relative’s place, Rajni added. None of the homes were spared by nature’s fury in and around Sarkhet village.
Dinesh Kotwal, 40, said he lost his house too. “Two generations of our family lived there. We saved ourselves by taking shelter in the jungle at night,” Kotwal added.
For 12-year-old Aanchal Pawar, the loss was two-fold. She not only saw her house getting destroyed by the gushing water, but a portion of her school was swept away too.
About 40 villagers, including children, spent nearly four hours (between 1am and 5am) in the jungle to escape the flash floods in the intervening night of Friday and Saturday, village locals told TOI on Monday. “The forest actually saved us,” one of the survivors said.
Another Sarkhet resident, Kuldeep Kumar26, said he could barely recognise the village the next morning, once the water receded. While 24-year-old Pramila Devi said, “Sarkhet and Maldevta had witnessed floods in 2014 as well. I was younger then. But it was nothing like this.”