A document from the past: my (restored) photo of the Oct1968 disaster in the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya

The Story behind the above Photo:
I still have vivid and frightening memories of the Oct 1968 Disaster which engulfed the entire Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas more than 50yrs ago.
I was 17 then, a student of St Joseph's College, Darjeeling who had come home to Kalimpong during the Puja vacations in the first week of October.
Then all of a sudden it started raining...
Strange that it was raining so heavily when we normally expected fine weather with an occasional shower. Stranger still, that the torrential downpours continued thru the day and night and yet another day and another night ... and for 4 days.
I don't recollect much lightning or thunder so I presume now it wasn't any cyclone or depression which had moved up from the Bay (of Bengal). I just remember the steady and heavy drumming of incessant rain. I also don't recall any panic or concern either among the local people or in government circles.
Meanwhile it just rained and rained and rained.
On the fourth night, I distinctly remember going to bed and hearing muffled explosions at night - landslides were taking place somewhere and reasonably close by...
On the fifth day morning, it stopped raining and suddenly we saw patches of blue skies.. and in the silence with no heavy rain, all I heard was sounds of water - water gushing out of crevices, trickling down some hidden corner, streets which had turned into rivers, water pounding down jhoras (natural drains), and the roar of the Teesta river way below my home in Tirpai, Kalimpong.
And there was also death.
It was everywhere - I saw the carcass of cows which had been buried in a landslide below our home, and near Nandu Ram's Wool Godown (now the CST - Central School for TIbetans) barely 5 mins walk from my home, some 15 people died in a huge landslide (refer the 'explosions'). Further down, in Dungra bustee, a jhora had burst its banks and swept away an entire clan of 7 of our relatives.
My little hamlet, Tirpai was marooned, cut off from the town of Kalimpong which was barely a kilometer away, and Kalimpong itself was marooned from Siliguri with the highway being decimated by landslides.
So we heard new sounds - sounds of helicopters as they dropped supplies and food, up at the army cantonment in Durpin.
I heard that the iconic Anderson bridge at Teesta bazar had been been swept away and that was when I and 2 friends walked down 16kms to photograph the destruction and havoc caused in the mother of all disasters in the Darjeeling- Sikkim Himalaya.
Realizing that most readers of this blog would not have even been born when the Oct 1968 disaster occurred and therefore would not understand the significance of the photo on top, I am attaching an image of the majestic Anderson Bridge which was washed away during the event. It was constructed in 1933 and named after John Anderson, Governor of Bengal.

Praful Rao,
Kalimpong district,
Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya

History revisited : Slideshow on the Darjeeling Disaster of 1950.

The Jun1950 Darjeeling Disaster

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Human memory of disasters is often flawed and very short-lived. As such it is important to chronicle and preserve these records as accurately as possible and the above slideshow on the ‘Jun1950 Darjeeling Disaster ’ is an effort this direction.
Not much data exists on the Jun1950 disaster which struck the Darjeeling district and whatever is available is, at best sketchy :-

•   The ‘Report of the Expert Committee on Landslides in the Darjeeling Hills’ states that 127 people died, mostly in Darjeeling town. No information is available on casualty figures in Darjeeling district or in Sikkim.
•   ‘Floods, Flood plains and Environmental Myths’, a CSE document, talks of a cloud burst in the Teesta valley which dumped 546mm of rain on 12Jun1950 whereas the official government website pegs the rainfall at 965mm for the whole month of June1950.

While rummaging through records for this event on the internet, I stumbled onto the ‘Annual Report of 1950’ of St Joseph’s School, Darjeeling which had a rather quaint account of the disaster – that of a student in the school and I have included it in the slideshow.
I also was extremely fortunate to discover that Mr Durga Das Pradhan of DAS Studio, Darjeeling, who had given me these photographs sometime back, was also the photographer who had taken these images more than 60yrs ago! As such I was lucky that he could pinpoint the locations where the landslides had taken place in the vicinity of Darjeeling town.

Praful Rao,
Kalimpong,
Darjeeling district

Focus on Uttarakhand

"I do believe that the time has come for a paradigm shift in disaster management from a 'relief-centric' and 'post-event' response, to a regime that lays greater emphasis on preparedness, prevention and mitigation"

-  Dr Manmohan Singh

Prime Minister
1st India Disaster Management Congress (29Nov2006)

Vigyan Bhavan

New Delhi

STH has been following the events in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh (HP) states of India closely.
The death toll has notched up steadily and now stands at 130 with 500 people missing and  73,000 (many of them pilgrims visiting  holy Hindu places in the mountains) stranded at many places.
Here are some facts on the rainfall :-

•  Most of the rainfall came down between 15-17Jun2013.
•  Dehradun recorded an astounding 338mm of rainfall in 24hrs on 17Jun2013 (see AWS data above).
• For the period 01Jun-18Jun2013, Uttarakhand rainfall was 440% above the normal and that of HP was 316% above normal (see map above). 
• In these 18 days, Uttarakhand and HP have received more than 31% and 20% of the rainfall for the entire 4 month monsoon period.
• The monsoons have just started and we still have more than 3 months of heavy rains ahead and extreme events, the world over are becoming more frequent!

Having followed this keenly, I am filled with a sense of dread because we went thru this entire grim scenario last year when Uttarakhand was battered by rain and landslides in August and Sep2012.
Meanwhile, the blame game has started. But living in a land where destiny, fate and karma can just as easily be held culpable, I doubt if we will ever get down to a more serious way of managing our disasters.
Pity, we never seem to learn and the PM's wonderful words, spoken 7 yrs ago in the 1st India Disaster Congress ring hollow.

Praful Rao,
Kalimpong

STH stormwatch : The Gathering Storm

Chasing a storm on the Internet

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STH storm watch : Another LOPAR in the northern Bay of Bengal

After a relatively quiescent period through the monsoons, in Oct we are seeing a cauldron of activity in the Bay of Bengal with yet another low pressure area (LOPAR) brewing, this time off the coast of Myanmar and shifting slowly towards Bangladesh and W Bengal.
All this is not too good news for us living in the Darjeeling / Sikkim Himalaya and brings back memories of the 1968 disaster which also occurred in early October of that year.

Comment by Praful Rao on 12Oct2012

As a part of STH storm watch we monitor the activity in the Bay of Bengal continuously during the monsoons and I kept a close track of this low as it formed and then gradually shifted on a north-westerly track towards Bangladesh and southern W Bengal.
Since the storm was never categorized as anything more than a "well marked low pressure" very little warning about it was given both in W Bengal and Bangladesh as such I was shocked to read about the devastation, death and havoc it caused in Bangladesh. You can read about it here
But perhaps the silver lining in all this is that even an ordinary person like me can make use of the tools made available by technology today to effectively monitor adverse weather fairly accurately and obtain advance information and warning about it .

Praful Rao