It was around 10:42 in the night on October 3. Prabhakar Rai, director of Sikkim’s state disaster management authority (SSDMA), was preparing to go to sleep in his hotel room in Delhi, when his phone started ringing. The caller was the sub-divisional magistrate of Chungthang in north Sikkim.

“I had gone to Delhi to attend a meeting and was in my hotel room. The SDM called and informed me that he received a call from the ITBP (Indo-Tibetan Border Police) saying that water level in the Teesta river was rising. The river water had almost come up to their campsite at Janak close to Lhonak Lake beyond Chungthang in north Sikkim,” Rai said.

Rai didn’t take much time to gauge the situation and immediately alerted the 24X7 control room of the Sikkim government’s disaster management authority at Tashiling secretariat in Gangtok city.

“At any given time, the control room is manned by three officials – even at night. As soon as they received the alert, the SOP (standard operating procedure) was implemented. An alarm was sounded and information was passed onto all the district collectors and the SSDMA officers,” said Anil Raj Rai, relief commissioner.

The SOP says that once an alert is sounded, all officers of the SSDMA would gather at the control centre on the ground floor of the land revenue and disaster management department.

“I came in around 3:30 am. By 5:00 in the morning all officers of the SSDMA had gathered. By then the flood had already hit and more information about the devastation had started pouring in. There was no looking back,” said an officer.

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A flash flood, triggered by an outburst of a glacial lake, had barrelled through the Teesta river with huge volumes of water and debris, gobbling up everything in its path – villages, towns, roads, bridges and buildings: The Teesta – III hydro dam at Chungthang was washed away.

The situation began to move from bad to worse fast and by the morning of October 4, the Sikkim government had declared it as a natural calamity and opened up helpline numbers. The number of officials posted in the control room was increased from three to around 60.

Officers from several government departments including disaster management, health, tourism, civil aviation joined in; later army officers came in too.

“Phones started ringing and with each passing minute the frequency of calls doubled and trebled. We started getting calls from people from all corners of the country…enquiring about the safety of their family members and relatives who were in Sikkim and were either working in the state, or lived here or had come as tourists,” said a woman officer posted at the control room.

Initially a phone call log was maintained but soon officials lost count of the numbers as the phones did not stop buzzing. Not only the help lines but even the mobile phones of every official rang constantly.

Though alerts were sent out to all officials posted across the state — and many panicked citizens made phone calls — after the first call from Chungthang on October 3, there was absolute silence when it came to communication with north Sikkim, the area worst-hit in the disaster.

“We couldn’t connect with any officials from Chungthang and towns located beyond it such as Lachung, Lachen and Thangu. That was big reason of worry for us because north Sikkim was the hardest hit. Phone lines were down, power lines were snapped and even the police’s wireless communication system was not working,” said Rai.

Officials said that for the first three days there was no time to breathe.

“We used to come to office by around 7 am and on some days returned home at around midnight only to report around the same time the next morning. Even lady officers, who had kids back home, were working till late hours,” said an official.

“While communication could be established with all districts, all our efforts to communicate with the officials in towns of north Sikkim went in vain. Even army helicopters, could not reach the places due to bad weather. So, when airborne operations finally started on Monday morning and stranded people were evacuated and relief could reach, there was a sense of relief,” said a senior official.

The job, however, is far from over. Top Sikkim government officials said it could take days to compile detailed data on the loss and damage, and rehabilitation work has only just begun.

“It may take a few days to temporarily restore a portion of land that has been lost, (but) it would definitely take years and thousands of crores of rupees to permanently rebuild and restore (the infrastructure) again. When I joined the Sikkim government in the 1990s, we had to cross the Teesta on suspension bridges. Now we are back to those days again,” an official said