DEHRADUN: There was no time to run. One moment, the workers were asleep inside their container homes, the bitter cold pressing in from all sides, the hum of the mountains steady and unbroken. Then came a roar – deep, monstrous, growing louder by the second. The earth beneath them shuddered. The walls groaned. And before anyone could move, the avalanche was there, like a sudden apparition in a horror movie.
Ganesh Kumar, a road construction worker from Pithoragarh, barely had time to open his eyes before the container was ripped from its place it was pegged and sent tumbling into the snow. “It happened so fast, we had no time to think,” he said from his hospital bed in Jyotirmath. “One moment, we were asleep. The next, the entire container was flung ahead, rolling over and over. It must have been 50, maybe 60 metres. We had no control. We were just… thrown… like puppets.”
Then came the deafening silence. The world outside was gone, above a thick pile of snow. Inside the crumpled container, the men lay tangled, gasping for breath, bodies stiff with cold. “Darkness, silence, and the unbearable cold wrapped around us like a shroud,” one of them recalled. “The snow was everywhere – pushing against us, pressing into our chests. We tried shouting, but the sound just died around us. It felt like the snow was swallowing our voices.”
The hours crawled by, stretching endlessly. The cold bit deep, turning their limbs numb. Some of them tried clawing at the walls, but there was no way out. The air felt thinner. Some stopped talking. “It felt like we were already gone,” one survivor said.
Then, a noise – faint at first. Footsteps. Voices, muffled through the snow. Hope surged through their bodies like a shock. “At first, I thought I was imagining it,” another worker said. “Then the sound got closer, and suddenly, the snow started shifting.” Hands broke through the ice, pulling them from the wreckage, dragging them into the open air. “They were our saviours – farishtey (angels),” another survivor said, his voice still trembling at the memory of the Army and ITBP personnel cutting through the snow to reach them. Manoj Bhandari from Uttarkashi district said, “Even now, the memories haunt us – how close we came to being buried forever. Some of our friends didn’t make it. That pain… it’s not going anywhere.”