SRINAGAR: Fresh rain hampered rescue operations in India-held Kashmir on Sunday a week after deadly floods swamped the Himalayan region, with medics and survivors describing nightmarish conditions in the devastated city of Srinagar.

After a few clear days, more rainfall accompanied by thunder and lightning hit relief operations in the worst-affected areas of Srinagar.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who has come under fire over the slow pace of the rescue effort, admitted his government was “completely paralysed” in its immediate response to the disaster.

“We had no way to communicate with anyone, and other than a walkie talkie set...we were totally and completely isolated from everyone and everywhere,” Mr Abdullah wrote in a first-person account published in the Indian Express newspaper on Sunday.

Security forces have been using boats and helicopters to deliver food and evacuate survivors.

While nine stranded patients at Kashmir’s biggest maternity care facility Lal Ded Hospital were finally evacuated on Friday, some relatives continued to wade through chest-deep water to look for family members who had been admitted before floods struck.

One woman, who gave birth in the hospital, spoke of her rescue from the swirling floodwaters in the hospital. “We took refuge inside a mosque for three days, after some local young men rescued us from the hospital,” she said, without giving a name.

“We are in the middle of a sea without any help.”

Doctors at the state-run Bone and Joint Hospital in Srinagar scrambled to treat casualties after medical supplies were carried off by the waters.

“We need medicines of all kinds, it is a disaster”, a doctor, told a reporter while examining a patient. “Tons of medicines were just washed away.”

The new rainfall magnified the stench of death from animal carcasses, rotting vegetables and overflowing drains. “It makes your eyes burn, gives you a headache,” Mehraj-Ud-Din Shah, chief of the state disaster response force, said.

Officials said it was too early to assess the full extent of the disaster with many roads still impassable but Mr Abdullah wrote that the recovery effort was “going to be a long, hard, and very steep climb”.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2014