Devastating Flooding In Ladakh
By Helena Norberg-Hodge
18 August, 2010
International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC)
Message From A Devastated Ladakh
Early in the morning of August 6th an unusually strong thunderstorm hit Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region in the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau. Ladakh is normally one of the driest inhabited areas in the world – a region unaccustomed to heavy rains. When the intense cloudburst hit early on the morning of the 6th, the impact was especially severe. The storm caused massive flash flooding that left over one hundred dead and many more missing.
The most extensive damage and loss of life occurred in the semi-slum areas on the eastern edge of Leh and in the shanty towns around the neighboring village of Choglamsar, but villages and farms well beyond Leh have also been seriously affected. Many of the region's roads as well as its telecommunications and electricity infrastructure were damaged. Hundreds of homes and buildings have collapsed, agricultural fields have been washed out, and irrigation canals severely eroded. Much of the region's traditional infrastructure has also been badly damaged.
"I never in my life saw thunder and lightning like that," 86-year old Sonam Angmo told me, her eyes wide with disbelief. "And once in a while we had some small landslides… but not like this," she added, pointing at the horrific scene of destruction in the valley below – houses, cars andtrucks smashed into fragments by a huge mudslide.
Like Sonam Angmo, elders in Ladakh all insist that nothing of this kind has ever happened before. Many are talking about a wrathful nature punishing people for the waste and pollution they have created. With climate chaos directly linked to anthropogenic global warming, theseelders are very close to the truth.
For me and the ISEC team of volunteers, the calamity in Ladakh began shortly after midnight on August 5th. We woke up in a roaring thunderstorm with lightning and horizontal rain. The next morning, we learned of the unimaginable devastation in Leh and the surrounding area. A massive mudslide had crushed everything directly in its path, leaving mud five feet deep in the buildings that were spared. All of Leh was shell-shocked, but rescue work started with amazing speed. Hundreds of foreigners joined with locals to try to rescue survivors.
Now, several days after the floods, stories of the devastation are beginning to filter in:
> In Choglamsar, a young mother and her two sons struggled to escape upthe stairs as the water and mud rushed in on the ground floor. She carried her six-year-old boy close to her, but lost her grip on her elder son, fourteen. He, along with the building's mud brick walls, were swept down the valley. His body was uncovered a few days later, about 200 yards away.
> Jon Weller, one of our summer volunteer, helped to dig out some of the worst affected houses in Leh. He was there as they discovered the body of a woman who had been trapped sleeping in her kitchen.
> The calamity did not spare foreigners. One of our Learning From Ladakh participants, Manuela Hess, had gone on a trek in a remote valley. On the night of the 5th, when the worst cloudbursts occurred, she and her Ladakhi guide turned back at the last minute and stayed in a village house. The next day she heard a first-hand account of the Spanish trekker who tried desperately to get his wife out of their tent to escape a landslide. But she was carried away – one of six foreigner who died in the valley that night.
> Not all the tales ended in tragedy. In Choglamsar a young woman and her father were looking after the child of a relative. When the flood started, the father was able to put the girl and the little boy on the second floor balcony. When he was swept away by the water, the girl jumped in after him. Miraculously, a whirlpool of water spun them around back towards the balcony and they managed to climb to safety.
> Another family – a mother, two grown daughters and a young child– managed to get away by running away from the mudslide. They reported afterwards that they climbed huge walls that they would never normally have been able to – one of the girls carrying a baby on her back.
The freakish weather did not end with the August 5 cloudbursts. The next night, more cloudbursts further up the valley from Abagon House (where we live) caused the stream to swell to four times its normal size and – with a roar like a jet plane – to push tons of giant boulders down the valley towards our house. Within a matter of minutes we were all running for our lives. The whole valley was evacuated, and for the next several nights we slept in the mountains above Leh.
On August 12th lighting and thunder struck again in Leh. Once again, most of the population in Leh valley escaped to the mountaintops – many in cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic, others running.
Rescue operations are being organized by the Buddhist, Muslim and Christian communities; the Ladakh Ecological Development Group has hosted meetings of all the NGOs concerned with relief work. They've set up an NGO coordination committee which produced a short paper of aims and objectives. They warned against bringing in inappropriate materials from the outside and wasting money on temporary shelter. Instead, they encouraged a long-term approach – focusing on the construction of permanent shelter using local knowledge, skills and materials wherever possible.
These are among the principles for which ISEC has long argued. In Ladakh's not-so-distant past, people were more in tune with the lay of land, the flow of the water, the winds and the soils, so that both the style and location of buildings were carefully and intelligently chosen. In the last 35 years, however, the development path in Ladakh (and in fact everywhere) has encouraged rapid urbanization and an ever increasing use of fossil fuels. Thousands of people have been pulled into Leh, the capital, in search of employment. Shanty-towns like Choglamsar – essentially a suburb of Leh – have sprung up in the desert, often in areas vulnerable to floods and landslides. These were the places where the worst damage occurred.
Although relief efforts at the moment are primarily focused on the areas closest to Leh, ISEC's Ladakh Relief Fund will be earmarked for the more far-flung villages, where hundreds of houses, water channels, and fields have been destroyed. Our work has always focused on stemming the tide of urbanization, allowing farmers and rural villages to withstand the multiple pressures that pull them into increased dependence on fossil fuels and outside commodities. Now, help in the villages is needed more urgently than ever in order to prevent further unemployment and urban slumification.
Please donate what you can.
Thank you,
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Make a donation to the Ladakh Relief Fund here
You can link to the Ladakh Relief Fund facebook site here
About ISEC:
The International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) is a non-profit organisation concerned with the protection of both biological and cultural diversity. Our emphasis is on education for action: moving beyond single issues to look at the more fundamental influences that shape our lives. Our activities include:
> Books, reports, conferences and films
> Local, national and international networking.
> Community initiatives.
> Campaigning.
We have worked in more than a dozen countries, from the UK and the USA to Thailand and Bhutan. Our programme in Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet', where we have been running a wide range of 'hands on' projects since 1975, has won international acclaim for countering the negative effects of conventional development in that region. ISEC has now established an 'Ancient Futures Network' to bring together groups and individuals from every corner of the world that are struggling to maintain their cultural integrity in the face of economic globalisation.
Helena Norberg-Hodge is an analyst of the impact of the global economy on cultures and agriculture worldwide and a pioneer of the localisation movement. She is the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC).
