Travelure
By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
GLOF is a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood. This is what happened in Uttarakhand on 17th June 2013, 2 kilometres upstream from the town of Kedarnath. The death toll was 6,054.
Recently, on 4th of October this year, a similar GLOF hit Sikkim, and killed 40 people and 102 are still missing. It also damaged 1,200 houses and 13 bridges. In addition, it affected over 25,000 people including 2413 who were rescued and 6875 people who were moved to relief camps. According to the Chief Minister of Sikkim, the state has incurred damages worth thousands of crores of rupees.
All this information is available in the public domain. So, presumably, our netas are aware. They must also be well informed about the causes of such disasters. But, in case these details have been put on the back-burner of their memories because of their anxiety to be re-elected, we will give them a synopsis of the facts that lead to such GLOFs and the high chances of them re-occurring with alarming frequency in Uttarakhand. We shall start by giving an overall picture of the fragile, young mountains in which we live.
Our Himalaya Mountains, as their name expresses, are The Abodes of Snow. There is so much snow on our great range that our mountains are also called The Third Pole. The first two are the North and South Polar regions. When the snow piles up high its lowest layer becomes ice and the snow above tends to flip off. In the Polar Regions, these huge junks of snow and ice dip into the sea and become icebergs, the kind that sank the Titanic. In the mountains, however, they slide down the slopes and form rivers of ice and snow in the valleys. These are called glaciers.
As all rivers do, glaciers too erode their banks and carry along deadly debris of rocks and soil. These streams of debris are called moraines. Sometimes the moraines merge and form temporary dams. Behind these unstable barriers glacial water piles up to form temporary glacial lakes. By their very nature these are very unstable structures. They can be easily breached by an increasing volume of water in the lake or even an earthquake. Earthquakes are fairly common in the Himalayas because our mountains are still growing as the pressures under the earth pushes them up. When this happens, the great rush of waters down the valleys carries everything with it. This disaster is referred to as a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood. It is therefore very important to keep a close watch on every glacial lake.
There are over 1200 glacial lakes in the higher reaches of the mountains of Uttarakhand.
In other words, there are one thousand two hundred places in our state which can, without warning, cause a major down-stream disaster. That certainly worries us as it should worry everyone in our state, if not the rest of India and the world. But we do not see even one of our elected representatives expressing any concern about this real and present danger. This is, clearly, indifference on the part of our netas and babus.
We understand that our glacial lakes are being monitored by satellite. But there is absolutely no point of these images going to our scientists in INISO. We must, as a matter of high priority set up our own Himalayan Lake Monitoring and Response Organisation. Their job will be to keep a watch on our glacial Himalayan Lakes, to coordinate such a watch with the real time precipitation of rain, hail and snow in the areas under scrutiny, to link them with the data of earthquakes and earth movements and also to coordinate all this with human activities in the area. The control of so-called developers is extremely important. This voracious segment of humanity seems to have infiltrated every segment of our civic bodies. They have destroyed life-sustaining aquifers, weakened the structure of our mountains by boring tunnels through them, attack our life-sustaining forests by attempting to change the rules that protect such green spaces, and marred our hill stations by erecting unstable structures that weaken our fragile mountain.
If you are a neta show your real concern for your voters, not by looking overseas but by looking upwards, by making sure that our glacial lakes are monitored in real time. That would be a good start.
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Tourism among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 halfhour documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only the authors’ views!).
