UTTARAKHAND, INDIA—The raging torrent hit in the morning, as Gopal Singh
Bhist and his son, a cook and the leader of a pony train, prepared for
work.
In minutes, the Mandakini river had breached its banks, sending a crushing
hammer of water, ice and rock through the Himalayan villages in this north
Indian state of Uttarakhand.
“There was no meaning in it. It didn’t give anyone a chance to survive,” said
Bhist, a gaunt, weather-beaten man with a piercing stare. “Instantly, the water
turned everything upside down.”
Bhist and his son were in Rambada, eight kilometres downstream from the Hindu
pilgrimage town of Kedarnath. Each day during summer, an estimated 5,000 people
trek through the valley to the bustling mountain outpost to visit the majestic
eighth-century temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu god of
destruction.
For the cooks, dishwashers, porters and other men who made their livelihood
from the pilgrimage, a typical morning was suddenly transformed into a life or
death struggle. The young and strong scrambled up the mountain. Older men, like
Bhist, sought whatever cover they could find.
“I found a tree and threw my arms around it. I thought, ‘If the tree is
washed away I will go along with it.’ I hung on alone,” Bhist said.
His son ran off with the younger men.
Soon, unknown thousands were swept away or buried under swirling
sand.
The rain beat down as Bhist clung to the tree. A sudden hailstorm pelted him
with ice, and then the rain beat down again, adding to the surging current
surrounding his refuge.
Finally, in mid-afternoon, the weather cleared. Slowly, a tiny group of
survivors gathered, and waited.
The pilgrimage route, and the entire town of Rambada, had washed away. There
was no way up and no way down. It was as if the world they had known all their
lives had been erased.
For four long days, Bhist and the rest of the older men huddled amid the
ruins of Rambada, surviving on crackers and bags of bread dropped by an air
force helicopter. The weather was too rough to land. Fearing the river was
contaminated, they shared four bottles of water scavenged from a local shop,
rationing their sips to make it last. Finally, the air force was able to
evacuate them.
There was no sign of the young men who had scrambled for higher ground.
Neither Bhist’s son nor any of the others ever came back.
“I waited four days hoping they would come back, but the people who went up
the hill did not return,” Bhist said.
The mid-June 2013 deluge affected tens of thousands of people, washed away
hundreds of villages, and killed at least 6,000 people. It stranded around
70,000 religious pilgrims in the mountains for weeks, as the Indian army and air
force worked day and night to evacuate them. The official tally continued to
fluctuate months after the disaster as more bodies were recovered.
Across rugged Himalayan valleys, hundreds of bridges were destroyed.
Landslides covered thousands of kilometres of road. Houses, schools and hotels
toppled into the torrent. Bustling markets were swept downstream.
The epicentre of the disaster was Kedarnath, near where Bhist lost his son.
There, it levelled everything but the Shiva temple.
The immediate cause: the bursting of a natural dam holding back a glacial
lake that ultimately triggered the “Himalayan tsunami.”
But the root cause was climate change, according to experts.
As the weeks passed, scientists concluded that something more complex had
occurred than the simple bursting of a glacial dam.
The devastation was unleashed by a perfect storm consisting of heavy rain;
warmer, looser snowpack; and most insidiously by a climate-induced glacial
instability that, in future years, threatens to wreak havoc across the
region.
Underlying all of these is a factor beyond India’s control: the changing
pattern of the monsoon.
Lifelong residents say they have never seen a torrential downpour like the
one that struck this past June. But the timing was as important as the volume of
the rains. Since local scientists became aware of the issue of climate change,
they’ve observed that the snow has been coming later and the rains earlier every
year. At the same time, the sudden cloudbursts that most often cause flash
flooding have become more frequent.
In 2013, the snowmelt runoff was at its peak when the monsoon arrived —
letting loose the deadly cloudburst over Kedarnath.
“Earlier there was (such a) cloudburst (every) five, six, eight years. Now
you see one every second year,” said Anil Joshi, who heads the Himalayan
Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization.
This year, unseasonal rains lashed Uttarakhand and parts of neighbouring
Himachal Pradesh for three straight days.
“Continuous and heavy” rainfall occurred on June 15 and June 16, said Wadia
Institute of Himalayan Geology glaciologist D.P. Dobhal. “If you see the
measurement of all the previous years it was 200-300 times more than
normal.”
But as global warming progresses, local scientists warn that such extreme
climatic events will grow increasingly common.
The shifting climate also has an adverse impact on the snow pack.
Warmer temperatures mean that snowfall that once began in October now arrives
in January. That leaves too little time for it to harden into more
heat-resistant ice. So when summer returns, the volume of meltwater is much
larger.
Combined with the snowmelt, the June downpour caused flooding in countless
sites along the six tributaries of the mighty Ganges that originate
here.
Ironically, with more water now cascading through Himalayan valleys,
climatologists fear the heavily populated downstream regions of Pakistan,
Bangladesh and India will soon suffer from water shortages as the glacial ice
becomes depleted.
Aside from the stronger rains and the later snowfall, melting glaciers are
literally transforming the Himalayan landscape at an unprecedented
rate.
An hour or two before the flash flood forced Bhist and the other labourers to
scramble for safety, scientific observers at Chorabari Lake, about 2.5
kilometres upstream from Kedarnath, heard a loud bang, according to Dobhal. It
had already been raining for days, and millions of litres of water had
accumulated in the lake.
Now, Dobhal speculates the bang may have been the noise of an avalanche or
landslide that knocked loose the natural dam of ice and rock holding back the
lake — draining it in minutes and sending the full force of the waters down onto
the town below.
It won’t be the last such disaster, experts fear.
Across the region, rising temperatures are fast creating thousands of such
lakes. And the growing volume of meltwater is dangerously increasing the risk of
sudden glacial lake outburst floods, according to the Kathmandu-based
International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.
“When you talk about glacial lakes, in Nepal alone there are more than 1,400
lakes. And if you talk about the whole Himalayan Range . . . there are about
20,000 glacial lakes,” says Pradeep Mool, who monitors the risk of glacial lake
outbursts for the mountain development centre.
More than 200 of these lakes have been classified as potentially dangerous.
Today, the tourists and pilgrims have been evacuated from Uttarakhand. But
government officials and aid workers are still coping with the tragedy’s
impact.
With the destruction of the roads and bridges connecting many villages to
larger towns and cities, tens of thousands of people are now forced to hike for
basic supplies such as rice and flour. Moreover, their renewed isolation
threatens to erase the economic gains that come from access to markets and
labour centres.
“We have villages that got totally destroyed,” said Aditi Kaur, 43, who heads
the non-profit Mountain Children’s Foundation. “The river has just become so
wide now, (and) the flow was so swift, that there is no rubble left to
see.”
“The fields just disappeared into the river so the food-grain you are growing
for the next year is not going to be there. The disaster that has happened today
is also affecting tomorrow and a year from now.”
Worse still, in some of these villages, all of the men worked in Kedarnath
during the pilgrimage season, so there are countless families whose fathers,
husbands and brothers have all been lost.
Because few village women have ever left their fields and livestock for paid
jobs — though all of them work from sunrise to sunset — a loss of husband and
father means the loss of the family’s sole breadwinner.
That was the scene that confronted Bhist when, five days after he’d clung to
a tree to save his life, he hiked four hours to his home village of
Chandrapuri.
Some 64 of his downhill neighbours’ houses had been washed away, along with
fields and crops. Half of the village was now a floodplain of grey
sand.
There is now nobody but 64-year-old Bhist left to support the son’s wife and
two small children — a 6-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy.
His religious faith, too, has been shattered.
“Where is God? We used to go there to pay our respects to God, to touch his
feet and daily bow our heads before him. God could have saved us somehow or the
other. He could have taken me and saved my
son.”
