Question

__________ ऋति: भिस्ति सहि शब्द भारो।​

Answer 1

Explanation:

1Scenes of landslide and flood disasters are regular features in the news media ; they flicker across the screen and are quickly forgotten. Even in the affected locale, once the debris is tidied up and damaged infrastructure repaired, attention moves on and all that remains is a half-life of litigation, official reports, and occasional mitigation engineering. Frequently, geographers are called upon to assist in such aftermath investigations and to make recommendations for policy makers (Kapur, 2010). This paper reflects upon one such situation and upon the results of an investigation into its causes and, specifically, to explain why a disaster affected this location and not some other. This study is also a cautionary tale because, by chance, it happens to show how scientifically conducted and statistically validated research on a single disaster event can generate findings that become far less secure when viewed from a longer term perspective.

2This case study concerns one of the landslide and flooding disasters that affected the Himalayan region in 2010, specifically, the consequences of the rainfall event of 18th/19th September, 2010, in Almora District of the Kumaun Lesser Himalaya, Uttarakhand, India, which had a severity unprecedented in 60 years of record (Figure 1). Here, a late Monsoon downpour deposited 277 mm of rainfall in just 48 hours at intensities that peaked at 33 mm/hr (District Administration, Almora, 2011). Falling on land that was already saturated, not least because of heavy rains on the previous two days, the result was a swarm of landslides and debris flows, and a spate of surface water runoff and mobilised debris that swept, downslope, into the river network, creating a major flood surge in the region’s main drainage channel, the River Kosi (Kaushilya Ganga). River discharge rose from its pre-Monsoon level of 0.07m³/sec (20th June 2010) to a peak of 618.1 m³/sec (18th September, 2010). The flood surge caused severe bank erosion and, where it swept against the steep Himalayan hillsides, caused toe erosion that triggered further landslides. Inevitably, Almora’s infrastructure, especially its road network, was badly disrupted. People were killed when their homes became engulfed in landslide debris and hundreds of trucks were trapped on roads that were, variously, blocked by landslides, undercut by landslides or washed out by river erosion (Sati et al., 2011). A month after the disaster, much of the network remained impassable (Rawat, 2010a).