An early alarm may have cut losses
JOSHIMATH: Bharat Singh recalled that he was out on the hill behind Raini in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on February 7, together with a few other residents, when they noticed a cloud of dust and then a large block of ice travelling at fearsome speed along the Rishi Ganga river towards their village.
“I told myself it’s the glacier. The glacier is heading for us. We called company people (the 13.2 MW Rishi Ganga hydropower project) frantically to warn them. They thought it was a joke. Then we realised that the Rishi Ganga project’s alarm system had failed and in no time everything was engulfed,” said Singh.
The ensuing flash floods, caused by a rockslide and the formation of a glacial lake, devastated the project and parts of the village, killed at least 58 people and left at least 146 others missing. It was one of the worst calamities to hit the region since the June 2013 Kedarnath flash floods and landslides, triggered by a cloudburst, left an estimated 3,075 people dead by official count.
Warning systems failed at both the Rishi Ganga and Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower projects, both of which were destroyed.
“We had a system of dependence. We had an understanding that whenever water levels rise in the Rishi Ganga project barrage, they communicate it to us and we inform projects downstream,” said a senior executive from state-run power producer NTPC Limited at the project site, preferring anonymity.
“But this time there was no time to respond. The volume of debris and ice was massive, the alarm systems couldn’t trigger [themselves]. It has now been decided that a governmentbacked early warning system will be installed for projects here to monitor glaciers.”
The decision to install an early warning system comes nearly eight years after the Union environment ministry said in an affidavit to the Supreme Court that Uttarakhand urgently needed a flood forecasting network. An expert body appointed by the top court in 2013 observed that the absence of disaster preparedness was a dangerous lacuna.
An affidavit by ministry dated December 17, 2014 said an expert bod (EB)y headed by Ravi Chopra, director of the Dehradun based People’s Science Institute, had observed “very poor performance and a dangerous lacuna in terms of the disaster preparedness of existing as well as under construction hydro electric projects”
“According to EB, the operation of barrages during extreme events leaves a lot of ambiguity as to when the gates should be fully lifted. Without any real time flood forecasting network or an automated weather station upstream and the possibility of massive landslides, blocking of the barrages is a hazard in June when the snow melt component is very high,”it said. The probability of erratic monsoon behaviour is only likely to increase with global warming, the affidavit said. HT sent a query to the ministry on Monday as to why an early warning system hadn’t been put in place in all these years. The query hadn’t elicited a response as of press time.