In Maharashtra’s Raigad district, there are 103 villages officially labelled as landslide-prone. But Taliye does not figure on the list. The subdivisional office at Mahad does not have a single archival file that chronicles any landslide in the village. It’s at a distance from the Western Ghats and was considered safe, till recently. On July 22, everything changed in one swift blow. A mammoth landslide, triggered by incessant and heavy rainfall, devastated this nondescript village, killing 84 people. About 31 bodies were buried so deep in the sludge that they could not be recovered. A fortnight later, the local administration is still grappling with it. “Even we want to know, ye kaise ho gaya (how did this happen)?” says Raigad district magistrate Nidhi Chaudhary on a phone call with ET. “Taliye is not located in a landslide-prone area. It has no history of landslides. There is no mining activity in the hills, nor is there deforestation. Yet, there were landslides in areas located 2-3 km from the hills. There should be a scientific study to understand this rare geological phenomenon,” she says, adding that residents of the locality must know whether this was a one-off incident or whether the entire area has because susceptible because of this shake-up. In the district, 25 pockets spread across 11 villages, including Taliye, were hit by landslides on the same day. None was listed as landslide-prone. While India was more or less prepared for the multiple heat waves and five cyclones that made landfall during the pandemic, mainly due to better forecasting, the country is still short of a robust mechanism to respond in advance to natural disasters such as landslides, flash floods and even lightning strikes. 85131847In February, an avalanche in the upper catchment of the Rishiganga river in Uttarakhand caused a flash flood, washing away a 13 MW hydro project. Satellite images later showed that a landslide had triggered a snow avalanche at an altitude of 5,600 m. In the last fortnight, there have been multiple incidents of cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides in Indian hills; Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir were the worst-affected. Last month, 23 people died when lightning hit Rajasthan’s Amer Fort, with some of the tourists falling down the hill into the bushes below. According to a protocol on thunderstorm and lightning, released by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) last month, about 2,500 people in India die of lightning strikes every year. Yet, lightning arresters have been installed only in select government and private buildings, that too in some cities. The Covid pandemic, which has so far killed over 4.2 lakh people in the country, has been so devastating that it has overshadowed all natural tragedies. Also, responding to natural disasters is not easy during the pandemic as the response teams need to follow Covid protocols. About 97% personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) are fully vaccinated against Covid, says NDMA member Kamal Kishore. NDRF has 12 battalions, each having 1,150 personnel. According to Kishore, accurate forecasting as well as enhanced investments in the last several years on community-based preparedness and professionalising the response force have given dividends in containing the number of deaths due to cyclones and heat waves. “Unlike cyclones, where forecasting and early warning systems in India are very robust, landslides are highly localised, making specific predictions difficult. Forecasting flash flood sufficiently ahead of the event is even harder. But that’s not India-specific; it’s a global challenge,” he says. 85131906In India, there are multiple government agencies that manage disasters and forecast natural hazards. Union home ministry is the nodal agency for managing natural disasters, except drought, hailstorm and pest attack, which come under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. For major crises that require coordination with states, the National Crisis Management Committee comes to the fore. As far as predictions are concerned, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecasts rainfall, cyclones, heat waves, fog, thunderstorms etc whereas landslides are handled by the Geological Survey of India (GSI), and floods by the Central Water Commission. It also collaborates with government agencies of neighbouring countries. “We receive flood forecasting data daily from 45 hydro meteorological stations of Nepal, 32 stations of Bhutan and three of China,” says CWC director Sharad Chandra. An accurate forecast, given about 5-7 days in advance, can make a big difference on the ground. The local administration will get sufficient time to issue alerts and evacuate people if needed. Also, response teams can get ready on the ground. In Raigad, a helicopter carrying a response team could not land as there was no suitable ground to be found in the deluge. Had there been a forecast, particularly of the scale of the landslide, such a team could have been requisitioned and stationed earlier. IMD’s director general, Dr Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, says the accuracy of his department’s forecasting mechanism improved by 20-40% between 2015 and 2020. “In five years, the accuracy of our forecasts for severe weather events such as cyclones, heavy rains, heat waves etc., has increased by at least 20%. Accuracy in cyclone forecasting has helped a lot in minimising the loss of lives,” he says, adding that the response department now takes IMD’s forecasts very seriously, leading to robust interventions. According to IMD’s data, accuracy of predicting a thunderstorm 24 hours ahead of the event rose from 61% in 2015 to 88% in 2020. In case of heavy monsoon rainfall forecasts, the strike rate now is 77% when issued 24 hours in advance and 59% when given five days earlier. In the case of heat wave prediction issued 24 hours before, the accuracy rate improved from 67% in 2015 to 95-100% in 2020. For the ones issued 72 hours ahead, the accuracy rate is 70% only. According to heat wave death data, which NDMA has collected from states for its internal analysis (and which ET has reviewed), the fall was pretty sharp, from 2,040 deaths in 2015 to just 25 in 2018, before rising again to 226 in 2019. The data for 2020 have not been validated by the organisation. This fall is significant as heat wave days in India had risen from 7.4 in 2015 to 32.2 in 2019, implying that the number of deaths in India due to heat wave conditions has been falling even as the country is getting hotter. This means India has been relatively successful in handling some natural hazards where the forecast is better. Also, once the magnitude of a natural phenomenon, for example, of a cyclone like Tauktae, is available, the local administration gets its act together. Tauktae, categorised as an extremely severe cyclonic storm, resulted in 174 deaths whereas there were 20 deaths during Yaas; both occurred in May this year. But there are several disasters such as landslides and flash floods for which no robust forecasting mechanism has been evolved as yet. Mohapatra says there has been some progress in providing flash flood data since last year after his department inked a collaboration with US-based Hydrological Research Centre and World Meteorological Organisation. 85131962On landslide forecasting, too, some baby steps have been taken. IIT-Mandi has been experimenting with a pilot landslide forecast project, an idea that cropped up after a devastating landslide in Himachal Pradesh’s Kotropi in July 2017. “Forecasting landslides is difficult as they do not occur very often. The landslide monitoring system at IIT-Mandi is good at monitoring and forecasting the amount of soil movements at sites. A landslide may be a result of several such soil movements that become frequent and increase in magnitude over a short period of time,” say IIT-Mandi’s faculty members Varun Dutt and Kala Venkata Uday, who built a prototype with the help of some students. They say a tragedy was averted on Mandi-Joginder Nagar national highway in 2018 after their system warned of a flash flood minutes before the disaster. The police stopped the traffic in time. The road was washed away, but no one got injured. Hydro-geological hazards occur across the Himalayan belt, Eastern and Western Ghats and the Vindhyas, covering some 0.42 million sq km or 12.6% of India’s landmass, according to GSI. The question is, even if a new landslide forecasting device is available, will the government spend money to place them across this vast hilly terrain? And, what happens when a catastrophe occurs in a different locality, like Raigad’s Taliye, which has no history of landslides?
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3lBChaW
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