Residents of Majra who reached Dehradun town on Wednesday in search of a safe place said they saw at least 10 fellow villagers get buried under soil, rocks and debris following the cloudburst-triggered flash flood at 4am on Tuesday.

The official death toll so far in the devastating Dehradun flash floods is 16.

Jama Singh, 45, a Majra resident, said: “Our houses started shaking around 1am on Tuesday as the clouds roared and the skies opened up. But everything returned to normal within 15 minutes. We thought something had happened nearby and that everything was fine now. We went back to sleep. But again at 4am, we felt a vibration in our walls and came out of our homes. We shouted and whistled so that the other villagers would wake up and run to a safer area around 100m downhill from the slopy terrain of our village.”

“We saw at least 10 villagers get engulfed by the gushing water and sludge,” said Singh, looking for a space for his two children, wife and himself in Dehradun town.

Deepu Kumar, 40, another villager who has reached Dehradun town with his family, said: “We built our houses in Majra village just a few years ago; now everything has been destroyed. We’ll return to our village and try to rebuild our houses after earning some money.”

The majority of the villagers either work in the fields or are construction labourers.

“There is work these days for us because roads are being constructed everywhere,” Kumar said.

The residents of Anarwala Gucchupani, another village in Dehradun district whose residents are better off than those in Majra, also fled the area.

“There was an unusual sound outside our house. We opened the door to see that the river water had risen alarmingly and almost reached our door. We ran through the back door. Someone removed the barbed wires on the periphery of our colony and we escaped to higher ground. We saw in the morning that there was water all over and our cars and scooters had been washed away,” said a resident.

Prakash Lama, another resident, said: “We have been living here for the past 12 years; never had we seen so much water before. It soon entered our homes, forcing us to leave.”

Sagar Lamba, a local municipal corporator, said: “We have made arrangements for the affected people in a temple. It has all the facilities. While some people have put up at the temple, some others have gone to their relatives’ homes. The water level is going down now.”

Anarwala Gucchupani was an unexplored area even 15 years ago, but now there are several resorts. It is a tourist attraction because a hill river flows through a gorge there and the village also has a 600m-long cave. It is popularly known as Robber’s Cave because dacoits used to hide there during British rule.

According to a research report released by the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, the Uttarakhand hills and rocks have become very fragile and they can easily be eroded during massive rainfall. It further states that the Maldevta-Sahastradhara areas, where the villages of Majra and Anarwala Gucchupani are located, are more sensitive than other places in Uttarakhand because they are located on “an active fault-line” where the hills are sharply vertical and landslide-prone.

The report says that the Baldi river had changed course on August 20, 2022, after a cloudburst and landslides. The research paper points out that houses were illegally built in the catchment areas and even in the middle of the rivers, blocking the natural streams.

“There should be a complete ban on such constructions and automatic weather stations should be established at several places to warn of the natural calamities, when there is still time to shift to safer places,” the report says.