04/12/2022
FLOODS IN KASHMIR
Floods in J&K are linked to the Jhelum River and its history of crossing the danger mark and thereby inundating the Valley aren’t exactly an uncommon phenomenon, if history and indeed its geography is to be believed.
According to Sir Walter Roper Lawrence in his book, The Valley of Kashmir (1895), “Many disastrous floods have been noticed in vernacular histories, but the greatest was the terrible inundation which followed the slipping of the Khadanyar mountains below Baramula in AD 879. The channel of the Jhelum river was blocked and a large part of the valley was submerged.
The other major flood to affect Kashmir happened in 1841, which Lawrence notes, “caused much damage to life and property." However, the first flood of devastating proportions to hit the state came half a century later in 1893, when 52 hours of continuous and warm rainfall, beginning 18 July, caused what Lawrence describes as “a great calamity". In 1893, he notes, “the flood cost the state ₹ 64,804 in land revenue alone, 25,426 acres of crops were submerged, 2,225 houses were wrecked and 329 cattle killed. Out of Seven bridges of Srinagar only the first bridge survived.
History alas, repeated itself within so short a period as ten years. On July 23rd 1903, the greatest flood ever known till then came down the valley of Kashmir on Srinagar, and by 10o’clock that day the whole of the ground covered by the European settlement also known as The British Quarters, as well as the flanks of the city, was converted into a huge Lake
Measurement showed that the water level was higher by 3 feet than the flood of 1893. The Bund protecting the Dal Lake was also breached near the flood gates, the water rising to 10 feet above the high level, and inflicting immense damage to floating gardens, houses, etc. Seven thousand dwellings went down in the neighborhood of the city, including 773 on the Dal Lake, compared with 1893, the damage to bridges was small. Only those at Khanabal, Amira Kadal and Baramulla (which later had weathered the flood of 1893) were swept away. In the Munshi Bagh, the old library, the barracks, two of the older were destroyed. The Residency, Nedous’ Hotel, all houses and offices had upwards of five feet of water in their ground-floors and people stepped out of the hotel verandah into boats. The church, with a very low plinth, suffered immense damage & only the roof was visible..
Flood Protection Measures Taken After 1903 floods
The expansion of Srinagar had started with the beginning of the 20th century in a haphazard manner. The low-lying land towards the south got developed into Civil lines there were European shops and hutments. The flood of 1903 swept away this locality and the then British Resident, Sir Luis Dane, decided to undertake flood protection measures on a long term basis. The State Engineer, Major A.deLotbiniere and his team were detailed to prepare a comprehensive scheme in this respect. After a survey of several months they submitted their note and chief recommendations.
These Engineers seemed to have followed strictly the measures taken by Suyya 1200 years ago. They recommended that to give a quicker and a wider outlet to the flood waters of the valley, the bed of the river from the Wular Lake to Baramulla be deepened and widened. This was to be done by dredgers to be run by electric power which the engineers proposed to generate at Mahoora sixteen miles downstream from Baramulla. It is interesting to know that originally this power house which later on supplied electricity to the city was meant exclusively for dredging operations. This station was the second Hydroelectric Power House in subcontinent.
Another important recommendation of the engineers was to dig a the spill channel from above Srinagar to a point 15 miles below it towards west. This would carry a large amount of flood waters and would definitely help in saving the city from destruction.
In 1905-06 the machinery required for the hydro-electric generating plant at Mahora and the dredgers for depending of the bed of the river at Baramulla were ordered from America. The Mahora power house was completed by the end of 1907.
Dredging operations began in 1908 and by 1912 an area of 6,110 acres was reclaimed from around the Wular Lake. It was allotted to cultivators for paddy cultivation. The official report on dredging dated 13th July, 1911, mentioned that since the operations began two years earlier, the level of the Jhelum was considerably reduced; the velocity of the current between Sopore and Baramulla had increased resulting in much greater discharge of the river. But the maintenance charges of the dredges and the replacement of their worn out parts was a big drain on the slender resources of the state.
Fortunately for the valley there were no major floods for a quarter of a century. The dredging operations, though valuable in their own way, were considered by the State as useless expenditure and in 1917 the dredgers were sold as junk. The result was that the old story of silting up of the river bed in the Wular Lake was repeated and when in 1928 there was a flood towards the end of August, the low-lying parts of the city of Srinagar which had by then extended to a larger area were inundated and destruction was caused to the standing crops. Again the state government woke up to taking flood protection measures, but instead of having a long term view of the problem, they started again to build high bunds round the low-lying parts of Srinagar—the chief aim being to save the city at the cost of the rest of the valley.
While the Valley stayed relatively flood-free for the following two decades, immediately after independence, Kashmir was hit by a flood in 1948. Two years later, in September 1950, another major flood hit the state, in which nearly 100 people lost their lives. The flood was, caused by the Jhelum’s overflow.
In August-September of 1957, another major flood was recorded in Jammu and Kashmir, with the Valley feeling its devastating impact. The floods almost submerged the entire valley.
Two years later, in July 1959, the state witnessed yet another massive “glacial" flood, perhaps its worst ever at the time, when four days of incessant rains lashed the valley and Srinagar, triggering the Jhelum. The flood waters of the Jhelum River touched 30.25 feet on 5 July, over six feet above the danger level
Due to a breach in the Jehlum at Batwara,flood waters reached upto Sonawar where it was restricted by a massive bund put up near the bridge.The affected areas in Srinagar were Batwara, Shivpora and part of Sonawar. There was a breach again and the flood waters reached up to the present cricket stadium where the water column was about 7feet. This flood was also devastating claiming heavy loss of life and property in the whole valley
The next major intervention was in 1959 when the government pondered over the routine inundation of the entire Sonwari belt. The policymakers, then, advised that since the roaring tributaries are getting massive amounts of silt into the Wular lake, its draining system is not efficiently working. So the Flood Mechanical Division (FMD) came into being with its main base at Baramulla. Four suction cutter dredgers and a dipper drudger were imported with a lot of equipment including motorized scrapers, graders and draglines and a full-fledged workshop was started. Tasked to dredge out silt in the crucial 8-km length of Wullar lake’s outfall channel, the idea was to increase water velocity and draining capacity from 9,000 to 40,000 cusecs up to Pohru and 45,000 beyond that. In 1984, came the new policy intervention with the state banning dredging. All of a sudden FMD became idle. By then, it had excavated 1255 lakh cubic feet (cft) against the total estimated deposits of 1438 lakh cft on the crucial eight kilometres affecting its velocity.
It cost the government heavily as most of the infrastructure (worth over Rs 70 crores) it had built over the years was destroyed. The silt drudger Suya (SD Suya) commissioned in 1962 drowned in Jhelum near Jagheer in November 1986. For months, there was nobody even to convey the government that one of its assets was lost. In 1968, three drudgers were commissioned – SD Wullar, SD Budshah and SD Jhelum. While SD Jhelum lost its balance and drowned, SD Wullar was dismantled on the orders of the then governor Jagmohan and reassembled in Dal lake. The 450-ton machinery was later abandoned for being an obsolete technology. SD Budshah, despite being very old still survives. During 1999, the employees tired of the enforced idleness revived Budshah. They would use it to suck 3696 cft of silt a day. They sold around 85000 cft of sand to raise some resource for its long term use. Departmental discouragement flattened the initiative. Interestingly, the sand that these dredgers were sucking to the banks was used by the lower Jhelum power project and the Uri power project as well.
While the state did witness floods thereafter in the following three decades, the one in 1992 was unprecedented in terms of its fury. Recording its heaviest rainfall since 1959, the 1992 floods were most devastating, purely in terms of casualties. According to newspaper reports from 1992, over 200 people lost their lives and the floods left over 60,000 people marooned in several north-western border districts. However, it is also worth noting that parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir bore the brunt of these floods, with over 2,000 deaths reported in that part.
