Most Leh slide survivors have suffered cuts on faces

Almost all the persons rescued from the flash floods that hit Leh town and nearby areas had a common injury while escaping the mud fury--deep abrasions and cuts on faces.

Rivers of mud were sent down mountainsides during a cloudburst followed by flash floods that hit the Himalayan desert region in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday night and Friday morning.

As residents, police, paramilitary and army troops helped pull hundreds of people out of deep mud slushes and damaged homes, doctors and nursing staff were stretched to the limit right from providing quick dressings and putting bandages on cuts and bruises to conducting major surgeries.

"Most of them were caught in mud. They had holes in the face and pretty bad wounds. They really need some urgent dressings urgently," said Virginia, a foreign volunteer at a make shift medical camp said today, two days after the natural disaster rocked the picturesque area popular with tourists.

Virginia also said there was an urgent need to give proper food to the truamatised survivors since they have been fed with only biscuits and juices so far.

Gushing waters swept away houses, cars and buses in a 150-sq km swathe in and around Leh, the main town in Ladakh.

"It's a sea of mud," several survivors said.

 The mud was about 10 feet high in places. There were also reports that a school building in Leh was buried under mud, with just the basketball hoop sticking out.

As people hit by a series of massive floods and mudslides were still coming to grips with the catastrophe, acres of "mud fields", that were till Thursday housing colonies and villages, are still to be dug up, heightening fears that the toll could go up drastically.

Scores of houses in areas adjoining Leh, particularly in Choglamsar, are currently buried under several feet of mud, dimming chances of people being rescued alive.

With entire neighbourhoods washed away in the flash floods in the town of 10,000, the local administration is finding rescue operations difficult.

Meanwhile, there were complaints by some foreign tourists of having to resort to paying bribes for flight tickets to fly of of Leh, as shell shocked tourists quickly made a beeline for the airport to leave the town at the earliest.

One tourist who was shown on a TV channel claimed he had to resort to the "nasty trick" of paying a bribe to get a ticket to reach New Delhi. "Otherwise, I will be stranded, I don't know for how long," he said.