ON UTTARAKHAND TRAGEDY (THE APOCALYPSE) : A road is an injury, a cut in the mountains, often accompanied by blasting which inflicts a further injury on the surrounding slope. An old rule of thumb says that the injury from a road on a shale mountain slope does not heal for thirty years.- that was the care taken by the British when building roads. A road on the mountainside has to stabilize with trees closing in on either side, so it holds firm, before another road can be cut. The British also planned hill stations meticulously, given the weak and porous hill soils which take in the copious rain from the monsoon. Take Nainital. Dr Valdia , the known geologist, points out that even when the population was minimal, at the turn of the last century, the town had very effective drainage, created by building nullahs, which ferried the water along the gullies and ravines to the lake; or the rain would have soaked in and stayed, making the soil shifty and the houses prone to slips. Now, in Kumaun and Garwahl, roads have little planned drainage and are indiscriminately blasted through. So much, that there is a shale bleed every few kilometers on most roads. Often, we see three tiers of roads on bare hillsides, shorn of their forests, thanks to easy access for the timberbaggers. Such bleeds never recover and this is what has been going on for fifty years. Further, in many reaches of our Himalyan rivers the slopes are very steep, like on the Sutlej or the Alaknanda. When the inclination of the slope exceed a a critical angle, the ‘angle of repose’ for shale , any little flutter caused by a rolling pebble can start an avalanche; this is called the sandpile effect. We cannot then build a road on such a hillside – as it will never recover. One has to tunnel. After a big rain of 20 cm in a day or two, which is an annual event, the narrow rivers rise by between 10 to twenty feet, water rushes and the rain comes pelting down. With no absorbent forest sponge to slow it down, it runs the amorphous shale, cascading down. The grim and graphic picture has by now been seen by all. Moving on , the government is so taken by economic growth that it misses 60 million years of evolution and that the health of the Himalyas and its rivers are our lifeline. The Tehri dam was a watershed – a gigantic one that submerged a vast amount of hill forest from Devprayag to 60 km up toward Uttarkashi. Dams are not born but built very invasively, with a huge network of roads and earthmoving work all around them. They leave the hillsides terminally fractured, as is plain to see. And now the new ilk of dams, the run of the river projects, are coming up like a rash.. They are less visible but divert water through huge tunnels under the hill to run turbines, also hidden, and then back out to the river. But this intervention is very invasive as well as it needs a huge infrastructure of roads and tunnels, accomplished by blasting, shaking up the hill and making it vulnerable. Pushed for power, if such projects multiply, not even half the river will run. Roads and dams have deposited shale and rock on all river beds and dried up most of the springs near habitation. This can only regained when the forest is restored. The more visible and obvious catastrophe is the building of buildings next to the river and without foundations. This the deregularization syndrome prevalent all over the country. Even in the capital all unregulated and illegal colonies are being regularized . At what cost? Whenever a contingency arises lives are lost. The dramatic pictures of collapsed houses tipping over into river make it clear that if the river rises by 15 feet and mud comes sliding down houses cannot be built without a foundation at less than 200 meters from the riverbed. Finally, all these terminal and irreparable interventions of roads and dams are being made in a highly seismic zone. Given what have just witnessed, God forbid if a big rain and an earthquake come together. Restoration Can we restore the damage? Can we get the forest back. Fifty years of arson is not an easy legacy to erase. It is time to call a stop to dams on Himalyan rivers to generate power. Only on firm rock hills can you build a road or a dam. Roads have to have drainage channels and bridges, wherever the hillside is running badly. And, as a temporary measure we need covered reinforced concrete sloping roof shelters, wherever there are minor breaches of falling shale, for the debris to go down without destroying the road. Where the slopes are too steep we have to tunnel for a road. And we must start right now to restore the hillside by having multiple retaining walls and planting trees to regain the soil holding forest. It is a monumental task and will take over thirty years. It will need huge investment and local community effort, perhaps a Hillrega. Vikram Soni
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 01:31:50 +0000
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