Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
A deep rumble, cracks: What ensued on Jan 2
JOSHIMATH: Sometime late on January 2, or in the early hours of January 3, residents heard a deep rumble – hours later, they would wake up to find long, deep cracks running down their homes. Officials, locals and experts believe that was the moment a punctured aquifer may have caused the ground to shift or subside, triggering a crisis that has left officials with no choice but to evacuate hundreds of families.
An army of government experts have been deployed to understand what caused the ground to shift beneath the residents of a town with roughly 20,000 people. While a final report is likely to take a while, a number of officials and experts believe that the culprit may be an aquifer – an underground channel of water – which was punctured through the layers, disturbing the uneasy equilibrium below ground and causing a seismic shift.
“An aquifer burst in an area near JP residential colony in Marwari ward of Joshimath on the intervening night of January 2 and 3,” said a senior government official of the Chamoli district administration, who asked not to be named.
The claim appeared consistent with various reports from residents and the detection of seeping water, filled with silt, at a spot near Jaypee Colony – likely pinpointing where the aquifer burst. “The silt quantity, however, has come down,” the official added.
On January 11, chief minister’s secretary R Meenakshi Sundaram told reporters that the water seepage from underground near Jaypee Colony was “continuously decreasing”. That the aquifer was the trigger appeared to tie in with residents felt, with many describing it “like an earthquake hit the town.”
Jayanti Devi, a resident of Singh Dhar, said: “On the intervening night of January 2 and 3, it felt like an earthquake hit the town. The sound was horrific. In the morning, we woke up and found cracks in the walls of our house and deep fissures in the fields. Previously, we didn’t care much about the minor cracks in the walls of our house. I don’t know what exactly was the reason for the ground shake.”
Gopal Lal, another resident of Singh Dhar ward, said, “My house had no cracks before January 3. Something happened on the night of January 2 that shook the ground”.
A report by ISRO’S National
Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad, uploaded on January 11 but taken down on Saturday after a government advisory to not share preliminary reports, found satellite data showing a gradual subsidence of 8.9cm in the seven months between April and November 2022, but in the days between December 27 and January 8, the town subsided rapidly, by over 5.4cm.