Deadly flood a sign of looming emergency
The disaster came with no warning. Mist filled the air, and the earth started shaking. Pushkar Singh ran for his life.
``The river was flooding with massive boulders. The trees were falling,’’ said the 37-year-old. ``It was terrifying.’’
Singh is a resident of Pang village in the mountainous northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, home to more than 10 million people, where a deadly cascade of rock, debris and icy water earlier this month wreaked havoc, sweeping away bridges and a power plant. Officials have recovered the bodies of 58 people, and nearly 150 others remain missing, as rescue operations continue.
The massive flooding illustrates the risks of development in an area vulnerable to the accelerated effects of climate change.
The Himalayan range, the Hindu Kush, the Tibetan Plateau and their peaks are known as the ``Third Pole’’ because they con- tain the largest repository of glacial ice in the world outside the Arctic and Antarctica. All that ice is susceptible to the warming temperatures in the region, which have outpaced the rate of global average warming in recent decades.
The melting ice and expanding glacial lakes heighten the risk of landslides and floods. Environmentalists say the construction of dams and power projects and road-building have put millions of people in a precarious position.
Experts say the Uttarakhand flooding was caused by the collapse of both a section of rock and a ``hanging glacier’’ – a huge chunk of ice – along a steep slope. They have largely ruled out a glacial lake outburst flood, a known hazard in the region that happens when retreating glaciers leave unstable lakes behind them at high altitudes.
``We can never know whether this piece of particular rock would have fallen with or without climate change,’’ said Myle`ne Jacquemart, a scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the role of climate change in hazardous mountain conditions. ``Rocks fall, they do all the time. But the overall signature that we’re seeing when we look at all of the events globally, yeah, this seems to be more and more of a problem.’’
The melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas in particular is dramatic and accelerating, recent research has found, with the pace of change much faster in the 21st century than in the 20th.
``This area is in the tight grip of climate change,’’ said Joerg Schaefer, a glaciologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who has documented widespread losses of glacial ice across the region over the past four decades. ``This is one of the areas where climate change will be most directly hazardous, and on the shortest time scales.’’
In the part of the Indian Himalayas where the disaster occurred – the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve – glacial retreat is well documented.
A study published last year looked at the area’s major glaciers and found that they had lost approximately 10 per cent of their area since 1980, equivalent to 25 square kilometres of icecovered slopes. The prominent Uttari Nanda Devi Glacier, for instance, is retreating at 22 metres per year.
The latest disaster is ``proof that the climate crisis can no longer be ignored’’, said Abinash Mohanty, a researcher at the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water. In a recent report, he found that the frequency and intensity of extreme flooding and landslides in Uttarakhand had increased fourfold in the past five decades.
Experts have long warned about the role of infrastructure projects in exacerbating the impact of disasters like these.
Ravi Chopra, who heads the People’s Science Institute in Dehradun, the largest city in the state, said the falling of the rock and ice mass was a natural event, but as it rolled down the river, it encountered barriers like bridges and dams. The floods picked up more debris and moved with greater speed after smashing into these barriers.
In 2013, Uttarakhand was the site of one of the worst natural disasters in the country, when massive floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains killed thousands of people. In its aftermath, Chopra led a committee, following a Supreme Court order, that recommended no dams be built in ``para-glacial zones’’ – areas where glaciers have retreated and left behind massive amounts of debris.
The two hydropower projects damaged in the latest flood were in these para-glacial zones, he said. The committee’s recommendations were challenged by developers in court. The case is ongoing.
For Singh, who witnessed the disaster unfold, the past weeks have brought forth long-held fears after local protests did not stop the power projects.
``We are scared of a repeat of flash floods, but what can we do?’’ he said. ``We cannot leave our village.’’
‘‘This seems to be more and more of a problem.’’ Myle` ne Jacquemart, climate change scientist