The ground team was five people.
Prem Lal, team leader, forty-one, Uttarakhand disaster response for fourteen years. His team: Geeta, who was the youngest at twenty-seven and the fastest. Harish and Mohan, brothers, who had grown up in a village three kilometres from the gorge and knew the terrain with the specific, embodied knowledge of people who had played in it as children. And Dr. Anisha Sharma, a young doctor from the Rudraprayag district hospital who came on field deployments because she had asked to, because medical training without field experience was half-training, and because Sanjay Rawat had told her this morning that there were children with possible fractures.
They had covered the first eight kilometres by jeep. The jeep had gone as far as kilometer eight, where the road had water running across it at a depth that made vehicle passage inadvisable. They had abandoned the jeep and continued on foot. Six kilometres on a mountain road in monsoon conditions, carrying equipment — stretcher components, ropes, first aid equipment, water — and wearing boots that were waterproof to a depth that had already been exceeded twice.
