When the mountains had a meltdown in Uttarakhand

The Rishiganga river seems like an idyllic brook from the balcony of Gyan Singh Rana’s two-storey home. The former headman of the village of Raini, who’s in his nineties, has a beautiful panoramic view of cliffs, glaciers, mountains, and the two Himalayan rivers — the Rishiganga and the Dhauliganga. In all these years of gazing at this view, Rana says he has seen the river flood from glacier soften solely thrice. “But I’ve never seen anything of this sort,” he says referring to the avalanche of February 7 in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand that he watched in disbelief. “It was a blast, like something exploded in the mountains around me, and unlike the sound of big rocks of ice crashing.”

Pushpa, one other resident of the village, was tending to her cattle when the catastrophe struck. “I really thought I’d die,” she says. “There was a huge cloud of dust. For a long time, I couldn’t see anything. I was suddenly knocked off my feet by the wind. I somehow got up and untied the cattle.”

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The residents of Raini quantity lower than 300, in response to the 2011 Census. They aren’t strangers to the vagaries of glaciers. Ranjit Singh Rana, the village headman and Gyan Singh Rana’s son, says villagers in the area ceaselessly go to the forests which can be a part of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, residence to a few of the most imposing glaciers in the Himalayas. “We go there to collect herbs for cooking. From there we can see icy peaks. They break, they grow, they recede and sometimes flood. But the recent event was simply extraordinary,” he says.

The sentiment is the identical amongst all the villagers: they’re conversant in the mountains and their moods they usually have seen tragedies earlier than, however the Sunday landslide that killed 62, smashed two hydroelectric energy crops, and swept away all the things in its wake have them shaken and frightened. After the 2013 floods in the State, this tragedy has as soon as once more put the highlight on the mannequin of improvement in the fragile area, the place the setting might not be capable of maintain huge tasks of improvement, as scientists have warned repeatedly.

A path of destruction

On that fateful Sunday, a mass of rock, round half a kilometre broad in response to satellite-based estimates, indifferent from a hanging glacier on a mountain referred to as Raunthi. This huge lump fell vertically for about 2 km after which pulverised into a giant cloud of mud and particles. Within minutes, a mixture of ice, stone, sand and water coalesced into an estimated 25 million cubic metres of slurry, rolled down the Raunthi stream, and slammed into the Rishiganga river. Part of this mass of mud has dammed the Rishiganga’s pure movement. The relaxation hurtled down, previous the Rana residence, and crashed into the Dhauliganga river that meets the Rishiganga.

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The power of the landslide was so nice, recounts Rana, that it slammed in opposition to a cliff and travelled for a few hundred metres upstream, in opposition to gravity. Then it made a ferocious descent all the way down to the Dhauliganga engulfing 5 residents of Raini village in its fury and at the least 62 staff at the Tapovan-Vishnugadh hydropower plant, eight km downstream.

Labourers had been busy in building work at the 520 MW energy plant which was delayed by a few years. When the avalanche got here, it trapped a number of of those that had been engaged on the barrages in addition to these inside certainly one of the tunnels used to divert the pure movement of the Dhauliganga.

The Tapovan site is now a huge expanse of gray slush. Workmen are trying a drainage on an industrial scale. The web site is teeming with bulldozers, excavators and all method of heavy equipment. The job is to unclog the mulch and particles which have blocked most of the tunnel and discover survivors, if any, although hope of this has pale. It continues to be not clear how a lot of the two km tunnel has been obstructed. Ten days since the catastrophe, solely about a tenth of it has been accessed by the machines. All the our bodies which were recovered up to now are from this stretch. However, the barrages that didn’t cease the onslaught of mud stay standing. Some workmen at the web site level out that had it not been for the partitions of the triple-gated barrage, extra mud would have rolled additional downstream.

All that continues to be is a pipe

Unlike in Tapovan, 8 km upstream, there may be merely no hint of the Rishiganga hydropower venture aside from a torn metallic pipe. A 60-metre bridge that used to attach the two banks of the Rishiganga has been obliterated. The bridge allowed individuals to cross over from Tapovan onto the highway that finally snakes as much as the China border. It linked two halves of the Raini village — one the place the Ranas reside and the different housing a number of residents, some of whom as children joined their parents in the iconic Chipko movement of the 1970s. Defence personnel, members of the Border Roads Organisation, and the Indo Tibetan Border Police troop down this half of the village fixing cable and communication strains. “We are sitting ducks for China,” certainly one of them remarks.

With the bridge gone, a operated by hand trolley that may ferry one individual at a time and requires 4 to pressure and heave it serves as a mode of transportation. It can also be getting used to hold items together with greens, medical provides, sanitary pads, and packaged meals. The different possibility is to stroll a number of kilometres down and gingerly cross a non permanent bridge constructed by the military after the catastrophe. “We are hoping that a new bridge will be ready this month,” says an officer of the Border Roads Organisation. But there may be much less certainty on whether or not the Rishiganga venture will floor once more.

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The ill-fated plant

The 13.2 MW Rishiganga energy plant that was designed to generate electrical energy with the power of the Rishiganga waters had a tumultuous historical past. In 2011, practically 15 years after plans to first set up a energy plant at the web site had been drawn, Rakesh Mehra, the Ludhiana-based proprietor of the plant, was in Raini to witness a trial run. He was killed by a falling boulder on web site. Disputes then started in his prolonged household over management of his companies, together with of the plant. Tragedy struck once more in 2016 when a flood destroyed the plant rendering it unworkable. Ultimately, the possession of the plant handed on to the Kundan Group in 2018.

“Mehra was a good man. He had developed the plant involving the villagers. There was a lot of support for the project as it was going to provide electricity to the villages in the vicinity,” says Deepak, a resident of the close by Peng village. “But the company that took over after Mehra died was different. It expanded the project and in the process, destroyed a Kali temple that was located near the dam site.”

The villagers strongly opposed what the firm did. There had been additionally disputes involving possession of the land. “The company blocked access to our grazing pastures and did not compensate us for the use of our land,” Deepak says. “This project is cursed.”

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In 2019, residents of the village petitioned the Uttarakhand High Court for the environmental harm that was brought about because of the use of explosives in the building of the energy tasks.

Silt and particles proceed to cascade down the Rishiganga however different issues loom. Teams of scientists and police personnel, who’ve trekked up the mountain close to the neighborhood of the glaciers, have identified a lake that’s about 350 m long. This, too, is Rishiganga water that has been dammed by the particles from the day of the catastrophe.

Though the water from the lake is step by step emptying, many in the village concern it is probably not fast sufficient earlier than the rains. “What if the river floods and we see a gush of water along with the debris? What will happen to the villages and the dams below,” asks Ramesh Singh, a resident of Joshimath who lives uphill of Raini for a few months. “The climate here is warmer than usual. Last year, the snow was falling on the highway during February. This year has been unusually warm,” he says.

The Rishiganga venture was amongst the a number of hydropower tasks that had utilized to safe carbon credit underneath the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in early 2012. This was when hydropower tasks had been seen as opponents to solar energy tasks. However with the monumental challenges concerned in establishing hydropower crops in the Himalayan area, the dangers from pure calamities, and the falling worth of solar energy, there at the moment are doubts about the way forward for hydropower crops and their viability as an alternative choice to fossil fuel-based sources of vitality.

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Development and native constraints

Atul Sati is a outstanding political activist primarily based in Joshimath, the tehsil that encompasses Raini and Tapovan. Sati, who’s related to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), had been concerned with actions for the impartial statehood of Uttarakhand. He has been questioning the developmental fashions in the State for years. In his two-storey home that additionally doubles up as a office, there isn’t any electrical energy for lengthy stretches. In the darkness he factors to a sequence of electrical bulbs from a window which can be from a substation of the Vishnuprayag hydropower venture on the Alaknanda river downstream. “That power plant is located right here in Uttarakhand but the power it generates is for other States including Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. It is not for us. There is darkness here, the people who work for the plant are from here, but the benefits are routed out of here,” he claims.

Tree cowl is rampantly lower in order to widen roads underneath the Char Dham Pariyojana close to Rudraprayag in Uttarakhand.  
| Photo Credit:
V.V. Krishnan

When the Uttarakhand authorities entered into agreements with personal firms to develop energy crops, it allowed them to provide and promote energy to anybody. Only 12% of the energy produced is to be offered compulsorily to Uttarakhand.

While hydropower is the mainstay of electrical energy energy technology in the State, Uttarakhand didn’t actually need giant hydropower tasks resembling the Tapovan plant, says Sati. The wants of enormous elements of the State could be met with smaller tasks which can be not more than 5 MW, he says.

“The promise of carving out Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh was precisely that the geography and the challenges posed by the environment here are unique and so all development here must be framed respecting local constraints,” he says.

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Sati recounts the story of a tunnelling accident in 2009, once more involving the building of the Tapovan-Vishnugadh energy venture, to show how there may be little accountability for excavation tasks. Geologists Piyoosh Rautela of the Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre, Government of Uttarakhand, and M.P.S. Bisht of Garhwal University wrote about the identical incident in a 2010 article in the scientific journal Current Science.

Larsen and Toubro (L&T), the infrastructure firm, employed a tunnel boring machine (TBM), a enormous drilling equipment that’s used as an alternative choice to blasting mountains with explosives, to excavate an 8-km tunnel. The head race tunnel, by way of which the pure movement of the river is diverted, was positioned in a geologically fragile space under Joshimath. On Christmas eve in 2009, the TBM, positioned practically a kilometre under the floor, ended up puncturing a water-bearing aquifer about 3 km inward of the left financial institution of the Alaknanda close to Shelong village. “The site was more than a kilometre below the surface, somewhere below Auli, according to the project authorities. The water discharge was reportedly between 700 and 800 litres/sec. The aquifer discharge was about 60-70 million litres daily, enough to sustain 2-3 million people,” Rautela and Bisht wrote.

The caving-in after the collision broken the TBM. In 2016, L&T washed its arms off the venture and NTPC, the venture builders, commissioned the Hindustan Construction Company to repair the machine.

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Geologists R.K. Goel and Bhawani Singh wrote in a analysis paper on Himalayan tunnels that the TBM was lastly made operational after a second excavation tunnel was bored by way of. Sati mentioned that after a transient restoration, the machine failed once more. The problem with tunnel boring in the Himalayas is that these mountains are comparatively youthful and have a number of areas which can be tectonically lively. “Faced with cost and time constraints, detailed investigations before selecting a tunnel alignment are often compromised, resulting in encountering disturbed geological conditions. It is essential that detailed exploration work is carried out before the start of the project and exploration ahead of the face is undertaken on a continuous basis,” they wrote in their article.

Vulnerable mountains

The vulnerability of the Himalayas to flash floods, landslides and earthquakes was introduced residence in 2013 when floods killed at the least 6,000 individuals, destroyed hydropower tasks and plunged the State into darkness for days. Following that catastrophe, the Supreme Court constituted a committee, led by Ravi Chopra, founder and director of the People’s Science Institute, Dehradun, to evaluate the position of hydroelectric tasks in inflicting environmental degradation in the Himalayas and in inflicting the floods of Uttarakhand in 2013.

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In its April 2014 report, the committee singled out para-glacial zones (areas larger than 2,000 m from sea stage) and valleys north of the Main Central Thrust (MCT), a geological fault the place the Indian Plate has pushed underneath the Eurasian Plate alongside the Himalayas, as “ disaster-prone areas.” The committee really useful that hydroelectric tasks not be constructed in these valleys. These suggestions had been accepted by the Union Environment Ministry and positioned earlier than the Supreme Court in December 2014.

The apex court docket really useful that 24 proposed tasks be stayed however no selections had been taken on ongoing tasks resembling the Tapovan-Vishnugadh and on the Rishiganga. The committee additionally really useful putting in a flood warning system.

Chardham challenges

“Last Sunday’s tragic disaster has confirmed our fears and warnings. Hundreds of crores spent in the last 7 years for constructing these dangerous dams have ended up with the loss of over 200 persons, domestic animals and destruction of national property,” Ravi Chopra wrote in a letter to the Supreme Court on February 13.

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This, nevertheless, was additionally written in the context of one other ongoing venture referred to as the Char Dham Pariyojana, which is a 900-km-long highway widening venture connecting main pilgrimage spots in Uttarakhand. The drive from Dehradun, at the foothills of the Himalayas, as much as locations resembling Kedarnath and Badrinath is as a lot replete with lovely views of valleys, Himalayan rivers and glacial peaks as it’s with swarms of JCB excavators, muck dumping websites, scaffoldings, half-erected pillars to help a future railway line, and frequent roadblocks. Large quantities of rock are being lower to widen stretches of the highway. After protests by a number of environmental teams in opposition to the Char Dham Pariyojana building venture, which isn’t a single ₹12,000-crore venture however consists of 53 small tasks which can be dealt with by separate contractors and corporations, the Supreme Court constituted a committee, once more headed by Chopra, to counsel measures by which the venture could possibly be executed with minimal environmental harm. There was dissent inside the committee on the matter of the applicable width of the new roads. Chopra and two different members opined that the roads be no wider than 7m of tarred floor. A majority of the committee members advised a 12m tarred floor width. Making the roads 12m broad, argued Chopra and the two members, would end result in additional assault of the mountains. They mentioned that this was additionally in contravention of the standing suggestions of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways that hill roads, notably above the MCT, shouldn’t be not more than 5.5m broad. The Supreme Court is but to take a view on the matter.

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“There are numerous instances where the roads have been identified by experts as being prone to destabilisation and landslides. Disaster resilience is more critical than simply wide highways. Slope stabilisation works so far have been most inadequate as evident from the frequent failures and road closures. Excessive tree-felling, indiscriminate disposal of road construction and landslides debris have endangered downhill slopes and polluted rivers,” Chopra famous in his letter.

“In the case of Himalayan development we are all like the proverbial blind men identifying the elephant,” Kalachand Sain, Director, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, instructed The Puucho. In the aftermath of the newest catastrophe, 5 of Sain’s colleagues drove after which took a helicopter to survey the glacier to determine the causes of the harm.

“This is a difficult terrain to study. Even today we cannot forecast an earthquake or an avalanche in the region with the required accuracy. Scientists can assess potential risks. The government must live up to its promises of providing infrastructure and services. But when something goes wrong, we all collectively suffer,” he says.