
For anybody tiring of reading of natural calamities in the US for which scientists can see a clear signature of human meddling and error while a crowing crowd of top politicians shake their heads at the nonsensical notion of blaming ourselves, here is something world's apart. 'Same sort of theme, actually, with different names, places, and detail. In common with the US is that it arose in a large and ructious nation. This is a solid example of quick, hard-hitting science reporting on deadline, one that relates a disaster that didn't get much – if any – coverage here.
- The Times of India – Amit Bhattacharya: Geologist explains why Uttarakhand tragedy was man-made ;
Just run a search engine for images of the Uttarakhand floods and you'll see an eyeful of muddy cataracts that burst through the hills southeast of Kashmir near the foot of the Himalayas, sweeping away towns and villages. They are blamed for at least 800 deaths with hundreds more missing. Some have called it a "Himalayan tsunami."
Bhattacharya takes as his designated fool the state's chief minister, who apparently had dismissed suggestions that the roaring rivers would not have done nearly as much damage and not have caused as many deaths had officialdom properly policed where people built and the quality of construction. Judging by the Times's own compilation of stories of the minister in context of the floods, it appears the fellow overall has tried hard to do a stand-up job reacting to the tragedy after the fact. Thus I cannot judge from here the fairness of using a one-word quote, "childish." He was in the middle of a very, very bad week, leaving it possible that he had no patience for such an abstract question when there were people out there dying.
However, the one-word dismissal is a solid pivot into a well-constructed report. It relies on interview with a senior geologist at a national research center in Bangalore. Most interesting, the geologist's criticism has nothing to do with whether global warming has primed the atmosphere to inflict more floods of this sort. The telling quote is "heavy rain and cloudbursts were natural, the tragedy that followed was entirely man-made." This is buttressed by a concise, clear listing of geological and hydrological features of the area, well-mapped by government and other scientists, that showed what areas are prone to catastrophic flood but were built upon while official looked the other way. Furthermore, construction was shoddy and it often worsened the ability of the local landscape to keep the torrents inside natural channels. To save money, road routes were rubber-stamped by government overseers and then bulldozed through old landslides that were sure to go again – rather than on solid terrain farther up canyon and valley walls. So it says here.
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