DEHRADUN: On a bitterly cold morning amid heavy snowfall near Mana, at nearly 10,500 feet, 23 men knew they couldn’t afford to wait for help. When an avalanche thundered down on their shelter at dawn on Friday, they had only their instincts—and a loader—to rely on. Clad in nothing but vests, barefoot on ice, they ran, chasing the machine as it carved a fragile path through the snow. Their only chance was to outrun, what seemed to them was a collapsing mountain. For two hours, through snow and howling winds, they pushed forward, their bodies numbed by the cold, until they finally reached the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) camp, around 4km away.
Laddu Kumar Pandit, 28, was among them. Jolted awake by the avalanche’s impact, he knew there was no time to think. He lunged for his loading vehicle — normally used to clear snow and debris — and powered it forward, instinct taking over. “It was like death was chasing us,” he told TOI. “We had to run faster than we ever had before.” Behind him, his colleagues, many of them disoriented from sleep, scrambled onto the frozen road, their feet sinking into the ice as they followed the machine’s tracks.
The avalanche, stretching 100 metres across and rising nearly 20 feet, had torn through their shelter, leaving no time to gather belongings or shoes, they shared. “Some were wearing only vests,” said Munna Prasad, one of the survivors from Bihar. “Panku and Anil were injured when the shed collapsed, so we placed them inside the vehicle. Our foreman, Satish, who weighs over a quintal, couldn’t keep up either, so he got in too. The rest of us had no choice—we ran non-stop, sometimes moving briskly to catch our breath before picking up the pace again. For almost 4km, we fought the odds until we finally reached the BRO camp at 9:15am.”
The men’s survival depended not just on speed, but on knowing where to go. Dheeraj, Prasad, and Kisan had worked in the Badrinath region for two years and were familiar with the route. “That was the only thing keeping us from total panic,” said one of them. “We knew exactly which direction to run. The fear was there, but we never second-guessed our path.”
By the time they reached the camp, exhaustion and frostbite had set in. Some collapsed, their feet raw from the ice, while others huddled together, trying to grasp the reality that they had made it. From there, they were taken to the Military Hospital (MH) in Jyotirmath, where the warmth of blankets and medical attention replaced the deafening silence of the mountains.
“Only when we reached the camp did we finally feel safe,” said one of the workers. For Diler Singh from Jammu & Kashmir, who had seen his container tumble into the avalanche, survival still feels surreal. “Here, at the MH in Jyotirmath, I am with my colleagues, safe,” he said. “The medical staff is taking care of us. And when I think back to what we ran from, I can only thank our stars for being kind to us that day.”