A resident of Sonari, the headquarters of Assam’s Charaideo district, and family members including aged parents had barely finished dinner on July 18 when flood waters rushed inside their ground-floor home. It rains heavily in the district but a flooded home was a first for the family.
The water level kept rising, forcing the family to vacate and shift to the first floor which was rented out to another family. They managed to take some important belongings but left behind most heavy household items including furniture and home appliances.
“The waters, which rose to the over five feet, slowly subsided by Tuesday evening. But nearly 50% of the things inside including beds, mattresses, refrigerator were damaged,” said the resident on July 26. The family’s two two-wheelers were damaged by flood waters, silt and sediment, as was the government employee’s car.
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“The last time our area witnessed some flooding was in 2018. But it was on a much smaller scale and the flood waters didn’t enter our homes. The kind of devastation we saw this time was something else. Barely few houses in our town, which had their ground levels much higher, managed to escape,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}“The last time our area witnessed some flooding was in 2018. But it was on a much smaller scale and the flood waters didn’t enter our homes. The kind of devastation we saw this time was something else. Barely few houses in our town, which had their ground levels much higher, managed to escape,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}The situation is similar for most residents of Charaideo and Sibsagar, the two Assam districts which has experienced unprecedented flooding; thousands remain affected.
Assam witnesses floods almost every year during monsoon and this time too, 25 of the state’s 35 districts have been impacted. But Sibsagar and Charaideo, two districts where flood-related damage is usually minimal, bore the brunt in this round.
Until Saturday 66 persons had died across the state due to floods-- 48 were from Sibsagar and Charaideo. Nearly 400 villages and around 500,000 people (of the 654,000 affected in total) of the two districts are still affected and close to 15,000 have taken shelter in relief camps.
On Friday following a review meeting on the flood situation, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that heavy rainfall in Nagaland, which received 85 mm of rain against a normal of 30.3 mm (an excess of 181%) between July 18 and 20 led to a sudden rise in water level in the two neighbouring Assam districts.
“While Nagaland as a whole received 181% excess rainfall in those three days, the Mokokchung district in the state received 493% more rain that normal during that period. There was excess rainfall in Wokha and Mon districts as well in those days,” said Sarma.
He said that Charaideo district in Assam also got 436% more than normal on those three days and Sibsagar district got 104% more rain.
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“So, the excess volume of water flowing from Nagaland coupled with above average rainfall in the two Assam districts led to many areas in Sibsagar and Charaideo districts getting submerged and led to an unimaginable situation. These two districts usually don’t get flooded, but this time it happened,” said Sarma.
He said that unlike the usual annual floods in the state which occur due to a rise in water levels of water in rivers from rainfall and breaching of embankments, this time above-normal rainfall within just three days led to heavy flooding in areas many of which were unaffected for decades.
“Usually, people of areas which get flooded annually are prepared for such disasters. But the residents of those areas where flooding took place in Sibsagar and Charaideo had not experienced such floods and hence were not able to take precautions,” the CM said.
Sibsagar MLA, Akhil Gogoi, who is from Raijor Dal, on Saturday said that apart from heavy rainfall in Nagaland, other factors like mining along the Assam-Nagaland border areas (both legal and illegal), removal of stones and sand from river beds in the area also contributed to the deluge.
“The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has clarified that there was no cloud burst in Nagaland, which led to flooding in Assam. One factor was the heavy rainfall there. Another was illegal mining, which led to formation of large pits. Once these pits got flooded, the excess water spilled to the Assam side,” said Gogoi.
Experts believe that while the flooding in the two districts was of a mass scale, but the incident is part of a pattern that is being witnessed in several areas of the northeast over the years and more particularly in Assam, which is a big flood plain surrounded by hill states.
“These kinds of disasters were happening sporadically in different parts of the state. Different places are getting affected at different times, which is now a reality. No one living is Assam can be considered safe from such incidents,” said Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher on the Brahmaputra river basin.
“The reasons for flooding are weak embankments at places not considered flashpoints for flooding. Excessive mining in Nagaland, degradation of wetlands and large scale infrastructure development like construction of highways, which are several feet higher than surrounding areas are other factors,” he added.
Rahman said that focus has primarily been on finding quick fix solutions and providing compensation to those affected with no emphasis given on long allocation of adequate funds to study the flood plains properly and address gaps to prevent such large scale flooding.
“Scientific measures to predict such disasters, lessons learnt from past disasters, international cooperation to find solutions and proper coordination between between government and other sectors are needed. Or else we will continue to react only when an disaster strikes and forget about it within days or weeks,” he said.