Five tourists and the driver escaped with minor injuries when the vehicle they were travelling in from Mangan to Gangtok fell about 50 feet below a hillside after being hit by a landslide near B1 bridge on Sunday night even as the rain continued to wreak havoc with the road network in Sikkim for the second consecutive day.
The vehicle carrying the tourists from Bengal was thrown off the road after being struck by a pile of mud and stones that came rolling down the hillside in Gangtok district. All the five, including three members of a family, managed to extricate themselves from underneath the car with the help of some local people and police, who had reached the spot in quick time.
“We were travelling when suddenly a huge hill fell on our car, throwing it off the road. I somehow managed to extricate myself and also pull out my son with the help of the driver. I clung on to a tree for support to pull out my wife who was stuck in the slush. Some locals and later, police came to our help and rescued us,” Shyam Rajak, a resident of South 24-Parganas, told The Telegraph.
The other two tourists were from Siliguri.
“It was indeed a miraculous escape for them as there was a risk that the car would have been pushed to a gorge by the sludge and the stones,” said a local policeman.
Elsewhere in the state, landslides occurred at multiple places, damaging roads in particular as well as some houses. Traffic on NH10, the main overland route between Sikkim and the rest of the country, was affected for the second day on Monday with only one-way movement allowed along two or three stretches of the road between Gangtok and the border town of Rangpo.
Reports of houses being damaged continued to pour in from different parts of the state.