NEW DELHI – Long before the floods came, washed away hundreds of people and wiped out newly built dams and bridges, the warning signs were clear.
Scientists have warned that the Himalayas have been heating up at an alarming rate for years, melting ice that has long been trapped in glaciers, soil and rocks. According to them, the population was close, and the ecosystem of the region became too fragile for large development projects.
But the Indian government has set up the objections of experts and the protests of locals to explode rocks and hydroelectric power projects in unstable areas like the one in the northern state of Uttarakhand, where disaster struck.
Officials said on Monday that the bodies of 26 bodies had been recovered while the search for nearly 200 missing people continued. On Sunday, a surge of water and debris roared down the steep mountain valleys of the Rishiganga River, sweeping away everything in its path. Most of the victims were workers on the power projects.
Villagers said the authorities overseeing the costly development projects were not preparing for what was to come, which gave a false sense of confidence that nothing was going to happen.
“There was no program or training in the town on disaster management by the government,” Bhawan Singh Rana, head of Raini town, was hit by some of the worst damage. “Our town is on a rock and we fear it could always slip.”
Security forces focused on one tunnel where they said 30 people were trapped. Food was trapped to about 13 villages where the roads were cut off, with about 2,500 people.
The devastation caused by the floods in Uttarakhand has once again drawn attention to the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas, where millions of people are experiencing the effects of global warming. The World Bank has warned that climate change could sharply reduce living conditions for up to 800 million people in South Asia. But the consequences are already often seen as fatal in large parts of the Himalayan belt from Bhutan to Afghanistan.
The region has about 15,000 glaciers that recede at 100 to 200 feet per decade. The melt feeds or creates thousands of glacial lakes that can suddenly break through the ice and rocky debris that holds them back, which can cause catastrophic floods. In Nepal, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, a large number of glaciers are considered dangerous by The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, an intergovernmental group.
Nepal was particularly vulnerable, with climate change forcing entire towns to migrate to lower countries to survive a deepening water crisis. Deadly flash floods, some caused by erupting glaciers, have also become more frequent.
Scientists have repeatedly warned that development projects in the region are a deadly gamble, potentially making matters worse.
Ravi Chopra, the director of the People’s Science Institute in Uttarakhand, said a 2012 expert group appointed by the government recommended that dams not be built in the Alaknanda-Bhagirathi basin, not even on the Rishiganga . He was part of a scientific committee appointed by the Supreme Court of India in 2014, which also discourages the construction of dams in the ‘paraglet zone’, which he described as an area where the valley floor exceeds about 7,000 foot above sea level.
“But the government went ahead and chose to build it,” he said. Both of the hydroelectric projects hit by Sunday’s flood – one was wiped out and the other was badly damaged – were built in the area, he said.
DP Dobhal, a former scientist at the government-run Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, said: ‘When we develop such projects in the Himalayas, such as hydro projects or roads and railways, the study of the glacier study is never considered in detail. project reports or included. ”
The government is building more than 500 kilometers of highway in Uttarakhand to improve access to several important Hindu temples, despite environmentalists’ objections to the large forest clearing, which could accelerate erosion and increase the risk of landslides.
A scientific committee appointed by the Indian Supreme Court and chaired by Dr Chopra concluded last year that the government, against the construction of the highway to a width of 10 meters, approximated the advice of its violated own experts of the Ministry of Transport. The government has argued that a wider road leads to more economic dividends and that it is necessary for the possible use of large-scale military equipment to the disputed border with China.
The Supreme Court put him on the side of one faction of the scientific committee and ruled that the road should be limited to 5.5 meters, or about 18 feet. But by that time, hundreds of acres of forest and tens of thousands of trees had already been cut down, according to a report in the Indian newspaper The Scroll.
“If you have your own ministry experts who tell you that the roads in the Himalayan area should not have a tarred surface of more than 5.5 meters, and then go against the recommendations of your own experts, then this is a serious matter. , “the dr. Chopra said. “Unless the courts personally investigate the issue of the sanctions officers and the executives, I do not think the situation will change.”
Trivendra Singh Rawat, the prime minister of Uttarakhand, warned against the flood as a reason to draw up an anti-development narrative. ‘
“I reiterate our government’s commitment to developing Uttarakhand’s hills in a sustainable way, and we will not leave any stone unturned to achieve this goal,” he said. Rawat said. said on Twitter.
Exactly what caused the latest floods was not clear Monday night. The Indian government has said a team of experts will visit the site to investigate. Ranjeet Rath, head of Indian geological research, said the initial information indicated a “glacier calf at the highest altitude.” Calving is the breaking of ice cubes from the edge of a glacier.
Scientists who have studied satellite images before and after the flood said it was probably not caused by an ice cream bursting as there are no more such visible in the images.
They said the disaster probably began with the collapse of a rock slope that had become unstable in recent summers by thawing ice, and such a landslide could have broken up part of a glacier.
Umesh K. Haritashya, a scientist studying glacier hazards at the University of Dayton in Ohio, could temporarily dam a river and create a lake.
Avalanches also generate heat through friction that can melt ice that lies in its path or lies in the tumbling debris.
“It’s actually a landslide that’s a fracture rock and a bit of ice,” said Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta. ‘A lot of the ice has melted. And it may have picked up a lot more. ”
The town of Raini was in one of the worst affected areas on Sunday, where the 13-megawatt Rishiganga hydropower project was completely washed away. After that, about 100 of the town’s 150 residents spent the night in the open.
“We did not sleep in our homes for fear that more water could come in, rocks could move, something more dangerous could happen,” he said. Rana, the mayor, said. “We picked up our bedding in the woods, lit some fires and somehow spent the night.”
The area was home to a well-known environmental protest against deforestation in the 1970s. Protesters, a large number of their wives, would embrace trees not to cut down woodcutters, in a movement known as ‘chipko’, or embrace.
Mr. Rana said locals also protested against the construction of the Rishiganga power project, which began generating electricity last year, and that they even filed lawsuits, but to no avail. They were afraid that the explosion of rocks would cause fatal landslides.
“We heard gunfire and saw the rocks move,” he said. ‘When the project was under construction, half of our town slipped. We requested to move from here to another location. The government said they would do it, but it never happened. ”
Bhadra Sharma reported from Kathmandu, Nepal and Henry Fountain from Albuquerque.