The 2-year-old suffered for 10 hours in the ambulance before the hapless family decided to take her back to Bharatpur at 10 Saturday morning. [break]
Bhairabi Malla had left her parental home in Dhadingbesi for Hetauda Friday afternoon. She waited through the night for the highway to be cleared but ran out of patience and decided to take a detour from a hill above the landslide site.
"But I found the road extremely difficult. There is threat of dying if you slip. Thank God I am alive," Malla said after completing the two-hour ordeal. The half hour trek was crowded by the passengers stuck due to the landslide and she had to wait for her turn to walk through the narrow trail.
"I heard that the trail was difficult and hence didn´t muster courage to go with this small kid," said Shiva Lal Pandey, who was on his way to Kathmandu with his wife and a daughter with a plastered leg.
Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI) at the Area Police Office Muglin Bal Krishna Bhattarai said the passengers were ferried through the landslide with the help of a rope Friday but had to stop the procedure as the rocks were being broken Saturday.
Two big rocks have blocked the highway at Fisling, around 15 km east of Muglin. The rocks couldn´t be removed by excavators brought from the Divisional Road Office, Bharatpur and a rock-breaker was called from Hetauda. But the trolley carrying the rock breaker broke down on the way and then got stuck in the traffic jam caused by the landslide.
Having left Hetauda at noon, the rock-breaker reached the site at around eight in the evening and crushed a rock till Saturday morning. Another rock-crusher arrived at eight in the morning and together they crushed half of the remaining rock till three in the afternoon.
"We started one-way traffic after that but other rocks fell down after we had passed just around 25 vehicles in 10 minutes," an engineer of the Department of Roads said.
Thousands of passengers have been stranded as vehicles have created a 10-km long line on either side of the highway. People were using a trail above the landslide spot to get to the other side but police prevented use of the trail after more landslides.
East-West, Siddhartha highways blocked
Meanwhile Gajendra Bohara reports from Dang that passengers have been stranded for two days after landslide obstructed the Dang-Kapilbastu section of the East-West Highway at Suraikhola near Dhankhola Firday afternoon. Police said the road is yet to be cleared.
Meanwhile landslides have also obstructed the Palpa-Syangja section of the Siddhartha Highway at Malunga-4, Syangja since Saturday morning, reports our Palpa correspondent Tek Narayan Bhattarai.
"The rubbles have occupied around 70 square meters of the road. We are trying to clear the road with bulldozers and excavators but it is unlikely to be completed Saturday," inspector Rajendra Shrestha said.
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