Travelure
By HUGH & COLLEEN GANTZER
Our hearts, and those of everyone we know bleed with the bereaved families of Kerala’s Wayanad. This is, in every way, a National Disaster as defined by The Disaster Management Act of 2005. The Act says a national disaster is “A CATASTROPHIC MISHAP, CALAMITY, OR GRAVE OCCURANCE THAT RESULTS FROM NATURAL or HUMAN-MADE CAUSES, ACCIDENT, or NEGLIGENCE. THE DISASTER MUST BE SO SEVERE THAT IT EXCEEDS THE AFFECTED COMMUNITY‘S ABILITY TO COPE AND IT MUST RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT LOSS OF LIFE OR SUFFERING, DAMAGE TO PROPERITY AND ENVIRONMENT”.
The Wayanad tragedy fulfilled all these conditions. So why has this not been declared a National Disaster? Is it because the Right Hand does not feel the pain of the Left? Matlab Dilli dur ast! The next hustings might throw up a clearer answer.
The word Wayanad, we read meant land of the paddy fields. Paddy fields are specially built to be flooded with water when they are planted with rice seedlings. It became clear to us therefore, that on the high flat lands of the Wayanad the terrain is used to accepting saturation. The highlands of Wayanad were the same elevations as those of our home in the Himalayas, Mussoorie. The beautiful green highlands of Wayanad extend from an elevation of 700 meters to 2100 meters. But because they are closer to the sea than Mussoorie is, they are much more sensitive to the ogre of climate change.
As we have said in earlier columns, animals and plants have evolved to recycle each other’s wastes. When there is an excess of one life form and a depletion of the other, the balance is destroyed. Waste gases begin to build up in the atmosphere and act like the blast in green houses reflecting the heat generated by living creatures and causing the planet to get hotter and hotter. The great pulsing, tidal, life blood of the earth, the oceans, begin to warm, heating the air above them and causing changes in weather patterns. The Wayanad was the victim of such altered weather cycles. But this need not have happened. We have developed weather forecasting methods which colour code depicted weather.
The weather scientists of the Central Government have colour coded predicted weather into four categories.
GREEN indictes that there is no need to worry.
A YELLOW alert says there is likely to be rain ranging between 64.5 mm and 115.5 mm.
ORANGE forecast rain between 115.6 and 204.4 mm in a single day.
A RED alert predicts the greatest danger: a deluge of water exceeding 204.5 mm in a 24 hour period.
Many people believe that the Red Alert reached Kerala about 12 hours AFTER the landslide had begun. Such earth movements begin when the terrain cannot hold the water that has been soaked into it. Water has weight. One Litre of water weighs l kilogram. A sloping terrain can hold less water than a flat piece of land because the greater the slope the more the pull of gravity. This is why the steeper the hillside the more prone it is to landslides. If, in addition to this, hillsides are cut by roads or tunnels, their supporting geological structures have been removed and landslides become more likely.
According to the Garhwal Post of 3rd August, The state government, along with various agencies and the district administration, police and security forces, are continuously working to safely rescue the pilgrims and local people stranded at various places along the trekking route to Kedarnath, which has suffered damage due to heavy rains. Trekking routes are essentially tourist facilities. If they endanger the livelihood of local communities of the mountains, they should be discouraged.
Such consideration of insaniyat or humanness prevailed in the decisions taken by our area’s Supreme Court Monitoring Committee.
These sensitives are being eroded by agencies like The National Highways Authority. The roads are important. But that does not mean that every road constructed by The National Highways Authority is necessary. We believe that the road renovated by the NHAI from the Mussoorie Library to Zero Point was totally unnecessary and calls for an inquiry. The NHAI’s political masters must be held accountable or else Uttarakhand could be hit by the voracious timber mafia, unplanned development and rampant tourism, leading to another Wayanad–like cataclysam.
(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!).
