Wiped off the map: How climate change claimed a Himalayan village

Russia Today

5 days ago

For Urmila Parashpe, a 48-year-old resident of Mumbai in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, it was a miracle to come out alive from the town of Dharali, which was swept away in India's worst disaster in the Himalayas since 2013.
Urmila was with a group of six people in a car when she saw huge debris coming from the hills and descending upon Dharali, an important intersection to reach the Hindu pilgrimage site of Gangotri. It was in the afternoon of August 5 when the flash floods began.
Massive tragedy. ATB Indian Army🙏 pic.twitter.com/1GkpcF6F0X
The human cost of the disaster is still unfolding. While Urmila was lucky enough to have survived the incident, Asha Negi, a local resident of Dharali, has been begging officials to search for her missing 40-year-old son Abhishek, who used to run a small Maggi and tea shop.
'I have not heard from him ever since the incident happened, and his mobile has also been switched off. Just tell me if he is alive and I will go home, or take me to the town and I will find him myself,' Asha was heard pleading with a security official at the base in the town of Matli, which was turned into a small base for evacuating people from the affected town.
According to locals, dozens of houses, hotels, and homestays, along with an unknown number of people, were swept away. Locals claim over 100 people could be missing and buried under the debris.
According to the Uttarakhand state government 1,126 people have evacuated from Dharali, as well as another town nearby, Harshil, which was also affected by the landslide. There are 68 people missing, including some 24 Nepali citizens.
The administration has been working day and night to restore the road from Uttarkashi to Dharali, which is about 70km away.
While the Hindu Kush Himalayan region is prone to natural disasters – in the last one decade over 3,500 people have lost their lives in this region –experts are divided on the exact cause of the latest case, though all point to climate-related factors.
Sanjay Vashisht, director of Climate Action Network South Asia, believes it was both a cloudburst and a glacial lake outburst that caused the lethal mudslide. 'Had it been just water, then the water would have passed in some time, but the mud which came uprooted the buildings there. The walls of the glacial lake were breached from the left and right sides due to a cloudburst,' he explained in a telephone conversation with Reuters.
Mohd Farooq Azam, a glacio-hydrologist with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, offers a different perspective. He believes several smaller lakes that were saturated burst in a cascading effect, with each breach helping trigger the next. 'When it came down on the way, it helped other lakes to burst and finally all the material (slurry) came down in the valley bottom,' he said.
Azam rules out a traditional cloudburst, noting there hadn't been heavy precipitation but rather sustained rainfall over 24 hours. He also suggests an ice and rock avalanche might have been the trigger.The broader context, experts agree, is that global warming is making such disasters more frequent and severe. 'There is global warming happening and as a result the frequency of extreme weather events has also increased,' Azam explained.
The problem extends beyond melting glaciers and snow covers to include permafrost – soil that has been frozen for thousands of years. As it thaws, slopes are destabilized, causing land subsidence and landslides. 'We saw it in the Sikkim disaster, where a permafrost-induced landslide triggered the Glacier Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) from South Lhonak Lake,' Azam noted.
While the role of permafrost in the destruction of the Arctic is well documented, its impact in the Himalayas remains understudied. 'Maybe in this event there was some role, but we do not know and we need to investigate it further,' he said.
Anjal Prakash, an associate professor at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, frames the Dharali disaster as 'a warning from a warming planet.' Whether triggered by cloudburst, glacial lake burst, or landslide-induced flood, the disaster underscores the increasing unpredictability and ferocity of weather in the Himalayan region.
Climate change, compounded by the fragility of the mountain ecosystem and unchecked development, is turning what was once an occasional calamity into a recurring threat.All seven countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region (India, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar) are facing the wrath of a changing climate, but Prakash points to a second critical factor: 'unplanned development' and the 'rampant development which we are seeing in Uttarakhand.'
The areas affected by such disasters are poorly monitored, he noted. 'We only come to know when something like this happens.'
Like Azam, Prakash doubts this was a traditional cloudburst due to there not having been sufficient rain, instead pointing to glacial changes whereby a glacier turned into a water body with a possible breach occurring thousands of meters above where the debris originated.
Solving this problem, according to Prakash, requires immediate action on multiple fronts: 'There should be an immediate restriction on hazardous construction and enforcing land use planning, banning building on river banks and flood plains. There should be an environmental assessment in the fragile zones of the Himalayas.'
As rescue operations continue and the true scale of the Dharali disaster emerges, the incident serves as a stark reminder of how climate change and poor planning are creating a perfect storm of destruction in one of the world's most fragile mountain ecosystems.