The Kosi Disaster: Millions Flooded Out
Date:
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Photo: Chandan, greenpowerindia.org
Photo: Chandan, greenpowerindia.org
Just as Hurricane Katrina caused levees in the Mississippi Delta to breach in August 2005, flooding large parts of New Orleans, this year's monsoon has breached embankments on the powerful Kosi River, flooding out three million people and killing at least 2,000 in Bihar, India and in eastern Nepal. After breaching its embankments on August 18, the Kosi took a path it had abandoned 200 years ago, 100 km from its channeled course, drowning hundreds of villages and fields in its way.
Experts note that this year's monsoon was not especially powerful, and that the embankment system failed in part because of heavy siltation building up within the embanked river channel. Compounding the problem was poor maintenance of the system.
Photo: Chandan, greenpowerindia.org
Photo: Chandan, greenpowerindia.org
The ongoing Kosi disaster bears another sad similarity to New Orleans in 2005: relief efforts in Bihar, one of the poorest regions in India, have been painfully slow, and aid workers are unable to provide safe drinking water, food, bedding or medicine to the thousands who have made it to the relief camps. In the crowded camps, officials fear outbreaks of epidemics as hundreds of people are already suffering from pneumonia and high fever. Making things worse, women at the relief camps are facing sexual harassment. The authorities are admitting that they are struggling to cope with the situation.
Santosh Jha of Bihar says: “I have never seen so many dead bodies the way I have witnessed in past seven days. Would you believe if I say that till now I must have come across 250 bodies of all ages?”
The breaches of the Kosi embankment are the latest signs that conventional flood-control measures too often do not control floods, but worsen them. The floods from the Kosi embankment failures were more powerful than floods...