10 dead as colossal landslide wipes out whole Indian village

At least 10 villagers in western Maharashtra, India, were killed in a deadly landslide on Thursday, while around 100 people mainly women and children are feared to be still trapped in there after the disaster.

The rescue workers in search of potentially trapped victims worked through the night as they battled difficult terrain and bad weather while the incessant rain soaked a mountain slope, officials said.

A wave of extreme heat, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding has wreaked havoc around the world in recent days, raising new fears about the pace of climate change.

The land collapsed in the middle of the night in the remote mountain hamlet of Irshalwadi, in the western state of Maharashtra, about 60 km (37 miles) from Mumbai, officials said.

Ten bodies had been recovered and more than 80 people had been rescued.

It was estimated that at least 225 people lived in the hamlet, the state’s deputy chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, told the state assembly. More than 100 of them were feared trapped in the debris.

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Rescue workers are having to trek with their equipment for almost two hours to reach the landslide, some accompanied by sniffer dogs.

They then have to labour in heavy rain and fog, occasionally dodging big boulders tumbling down the slope, in their search for survivors nearly 12 hours after the disaster, a Reuters witness and media reported.

“The debris at some of the places is 10 to 29 feet deep,” S B Singh, an official with the National Disaster Response Force, told the Indian Express newspaper.

Recently, due to a drastic rise in heavy rainfall, the death toll has skyrocketed in various countries including India, Pakistan, South Korea and Japan as a result of deadly landslides and flash floods believed to be a cause of climate change.