DELHI (NEW):
This week, a Himalayan lake in northeast India overflowed its banks, killing scientists and government officials who had been working on an early warning system for glacier floods in the area.
At least 40 people perished on Wednesday when the mountainous state of Sikkim was thrown into disarray by floods caused by heavy rain and an avalanche. The accident was one of the deadliest in the area in the past 50 years, and as of Friday, dozens of people were still missing.
Officials involved in the project told Reuters that the first portion of the system, a camera to monitor Lhonak Lake’s level and meteorological equipment, was placed last month.
Scientists believe that more individuals would have had time to evacuate if the warning system had been functioning properly.
The Lhonak Lake warning system’s specifics have never before been made public.
“It’s quite absurd, really,” said Simon Allen, a geoscientist from the University of Zurich working on the research. “The fact it happened just two weeks after our team was there was completely bad luck” .
He mentioned plans to install a tripwire sensor to alert them to an impending lake overflow. That would normally be linked to an alert system that would tell people to get to higher ground as soon as possible.
“The Indian government was not prepared to do that this year, so it was being done as a two-step process,” according to him.
According to a source at the Swiss embassy, which supported the project, the monitoring devices were scheduled to relay data to authorities in late September, but the camera lost power for unclear reasons.
Dangerous glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) threaten numerous towns as global warming heats up high alpine regions. When glacial lakes reach their capacity and rupture, they can cause devastating flash floods in mountain valleys.
By 2022, it is estimated that more than 200 of these lakes would pose a severe threat to the people living in the Himalayas in the countries of India, Pakistan, China, Nepal, and Bhutan.
Early warning systems for glacier floods have been implemented in China, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bhutan in recent years. Reuters was told by reliable sources that India’s first early warning systems for glacial lake outburst floods would be installed at Lhonak Lake and another neighbouring location, Shako Cho in Sikkim.
Scientists have warned about the potential for outburst floods at the two lakes for years, but due to the design process and the search for funds, little real action has been taken.
According to Kamal Kishore, a senior official of India’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), India aims to deploy early warning systems at multiple more glacier lakes.
He would not elaborate on the Lhonak programme any more.
Even if the system had been in place, the benefits were not always evident, according to Farooq Azam, a glaciologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.
“Such kind of events are so fast that even if we have some kind of early warning system … we may only gain some minutes, maybe an hour,” according to him.
