8th June, 1997

Editorial:
The monsoons had not arrived early in the year 1997, but the pre-monsoon showers proved disastrous enough. The prelude to the monsoon was abnormally wet that year, but what wreaked havoc was a cloudburst right on top of the hill we know as Gangtok. A cloudburst above Raj Bhavan tested the drainage of the capital city and found it wanting. The ferocity of the slides claimed a total of 52 lives in and around Gangtok and parts of North Sikkim, with many families shifted to the then unoccupied White Hall annexe. Met Office records reveal that on the intervening night of 08 and 09 June, Gangtok received a record rainfall of 223.8 mm. On Sunday night, Gangtok recorded about half of this at 118 mm and Monday still woke up to a string of slides and slips. The entire month of June normally receives 650.4 mm of rain. Those who remember the night of 08 June 1997 will recall that water spilled everywhere and the copious amounts that flowed through Gangtok on the day cleaved away a building from its foundation near Zero Point along NH31-A. A landslide rushed off from just above Mintokgang and poured slush into a building on the Gangtok-Chandmari axis. Tathangchen suffered a sleepless night as rural houses further down were washed away and families buried alive, not only there, but also up at Chandmari. Baluwakhani suffered too. In fact, all of Gangtok suffered. It is debateable whether better drainage alone could have saved Gangtok that night. A cloudburst, after all is a ferocious event and no drain or jhora is planned with such an inundation in mind. What is disconcerting though is that standing in Gangtok 14 years since the calamity, one realises that the capital has learnt nothing from the incident and allowed public safety to be compromised even more severely.

Let us begin with what Sikkim does by way of disaster preparedness ahead of monsoons- clean jhoras. This is obviously born from the visible signs of jhoras being overloaded with garbage and other debris, but is surely not the main worry. Jhoras are wide drains and will carry out any amount of water provided the surface run off reaches it. What the GMC and Civil Defence personnel [if the outfit is still around on ground] need to concentrate on is keeping the storm drain, which empty into jhoras, clear. The building collapse at Development Area in 1997 was not caused by a blocked jhora, but forced by a blocked drain which allowed water on to the road and thence into the building. Ditto for Chandmari, where the storm drains failed and overloaded the already unstable slopes and pushed out a series of slides. The storm drains in Gangtok, as also definitely across the State, are ridiculously ineffective pieces of ‘non’-engineering. They also suffer from gross civic insensitivity. Sift through the muck which blocks the storm drains, and you will face to face with Sikkim’s excesses- blocking the drains along the length of the State are construction leftovers, packaged food wrappers, plastic bottles. And while it is the inefficiency of storm drains [and not just the ones which run along the highway] which renders the capital unstable, jhoras keep getting cleaned up in a series of photo-ops and press releases. At worst, a jhora will burst its banks imperilling its, well, banks, and it should always have been a bad idea to construct along jhoras.
The Sikkim Himalaya is a young mountain system and hence already has a weak geology. Its valleys are narrow and its steep slopes obviously instable. Seismic activity is frequent and continuously shakes things loose underground. And then there is human interference which causes more erosion. Given how intensely Sikkim’s hills have been scoured, it is a miracle that so many portions are still standing. Being pessimistic will not however help, and for disaster mitigation to rise above the superficiality of the present practises. One way to do this will be to incorporate lessons [in Environment Studies] on the history of natural disasters in the region along with the policy decisions that followed. The young will they grow more aware, will learn to demand accountability and hopefully do things better when they call the shots for Sikkim in future.