Food packets dropped, 25 persons airlifted from remote ‘Us-Paar’ villages

At least 25 persons were airlifted and 400 food packets dropped by the authorities in the remote ‘Us-Paar’ villages — a cluster of seven hamlets sandwiched between hostile Pakistan and the swollen Ravi here.

Before the supplies arrived on Wednesday, around 3,500 inhabitants of the villages waited for food and drinking water for almost four days.

They are spending their days without electricity as the nearby power grid has been rendered non-functional.

Almost all residents had shifted to roofs of their houses as the river overflowed its banks and inundated their fields and homes, prompting the residents to untether the cattle so that they could freely find their way to safety.

What makes the rescue work difficult is the submerging of connecting roads.

The Public Works Department (PWD) has constructed an 800-metre-long pontoon bridge over the Ravi but this structure is dismantled during the monsoons.

A wobbly boat is then floated in the river to ferry them. However, like every year, this time too, it was discontinued when the going got tough.

As a chopper with supplies reached them on Wednesday, they decided among themselves to use the opportunity shift the sick, old and infirm to safety using the copter.

They had made a distress call to Deputy Commissioner (DC) Dalwinderjit Singh on Tuesday, when floodwater entered their homes and fields.

They were lucky to get in touch with the bureaucrat as the mobile phones did not work most times due to network issues.

The DC contacted the Army Aviation Corps to dispatch a chopper full of ration, drinking water bottles and other necessary items. Pathankot DC Aditya Uppal, too, got into action. A part of the cluster of these villages falls in his district. He asked officials to pack ration kits and life-saving drugs in a helicopter and send them to Lassian village.