Himalayan glacier bursts in India, dozens feared dead - Feb 2021
Flood
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedDetailed event map.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 206 · Deaths: 28
- What help is neededDozens of people are feared dead in India after a Himalayan glacier broke apart and crashed into a hydroelectric dam, with people hurriedly being evacuated amid rising water levels on a nearby river.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Detailed event map. European Union, 2021. Map produced by EC-JRC. The boundaries and the names shown on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the European Union. Dozens of people are feared dead in India after a Himalayan glacier broke apart and crashed into a hydroelectric dam, with people hurriedly being evacuated amid rising water levels on a nearby river. Footage from TV channels and news agency ANI showed water gushing towards the dam in the northern state of Uttarakhand on Sunday, washing away parts of it and whatever else was in its path. “There was a cloud of dust as the water went by. The ground shook like an earthquake,” resident Om Agarwal told Indian TV. Speaking to reporters at a news briefing in Dehra Dun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said that “seven bodies have been recovered from the site and rescue operations are going on.” Om Prakash, Uttarakhand’s chief secretary, said earlier as many as 150 people were feared dead but “the actual number has not been confirmed yet.” The state-run NTPC hydropower project site was damaged after a broken glacier caused a major river surge that swept away bridges and roads, near Joshimath in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, on February 7, 2021 [Ajay Bhatt/AFP] Most of the missing were workers at two power plants that were battered by the deluge, caused by a huge chunk of glacier that slipped off a mountainside further upstream, said Uttarakhand’s police chief Ashok Kumar. “There were 50 workers at Rishi Ganga plant and we have no information about them. Some 150 workers were at Tapovan,” he added. “About 20 are trapped inside a tunnel. We are trying to reach the trapped workers.” With the main road washed away, the tunnel was filled with mud and rocks and paramilitary rescuers had to climb down a hillside on ropes to get access to the entrance. Hundreds of troops and paramilitaries along with military helicopters and other aircraft have been sent to the region.
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 2 human-impact figures were separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 206 retained at 2021-02-07
- Deaths
- 28 retained at 2021-02-07
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 ffab5e12643244fe289860ab88dcdfee6fd16cb351c94c4d58c1ead70b982c87