SaveTheHills(STH) is a group of concerned citizens who are raising awareness about landslides in Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya. Many landslides are the direct or indirect result of human interference and preventable if sufficient care is taken. As such, unless we begin a comprehensive and sustained program towards landslide management, prevention and mitigation, the consequences of ignoring years of human callousness will, in the future be devastating.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Then and now....
"Landsliding is perhaps the most rampant environmental hazard threatening the Darjeeling town itself. Numerous slips have occurred in the past; however the intensity, cause and severity of the slides are being recorded only since 1899. From the records of the recent landslide events, it is quite clearly revealed that the frequency of the landslips is increasing from decade to decade."
-Rains, Landslides and floods in the Darjeeling Himalaya
Edited by Prof Leszek Starkel and Subhashranjan Basu
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Comment by praful rao
The scary part in all this is that landslides are increasingly creeping into our densely populated urban centres; (a few days of heavy rains in Jun08 and Eden hospital in Darjeeling cracked up, in Kalimpong we have the Alaichikhop landslide of Sep07 which is barely a couple of hundred metres from the town centre )
- and a look at the landslide maps of Kurseong and Mirik towns (available on this blogsite) reveals some more grim news
The question is how many decades more are we going to wait till we decide to do something about combating a hazard which is slowly choking us?
The clock is ticking; we are sitting literally on a time bomb!
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