Hunza Landslide Threatens Pakistan
The people of Hunza in Gilgit-Baltistan have had many, indeed too many a sleepless night since January after suffering a massive landslide in Attabad. The impact of the landslide has been considerable and has led to the forming of a natural dam in the Hunza River forming a lake that is consuming villages as it moves upstream.
Catastrophic effects are feared if the dam breaks with a tsunami-like flash flood of up to 20 metres high being feared which will have the potential to devastate not just the heaven that is Hunza, but Pakistan more widely as far and wide as the Tarbela Dam. In such a calamity, experts on the issue opine that the water would sweep down from an altitude of nearly 2,500 metres, being replenished by first the Gilgit River and then the Indus, before hurtling down the narrow northern stretches of the Indus Valley towards the Tarbela Dam, 40km north-west of Islamabad.
Indeed British colonial records from the 19th century report that two similar incidents caused flash floods that killed several thousand people and inundated huge areas of modern Pakistan. One, in 1858, was near the current disaster zone created a dam and a resulting lake appeared, one larger than the one in 2010 and history records show that when the dam broke, it unleashed a torrent of water that lasted for days and swept past Attock Fort, a few hundred miles south.
The lazy and lethargic PPP government has finally shown some interest in dealing with the impending disaster and has tasked the Army’s Frontier Works Organisation to level grounds with a view to making a spillway for the water to pour through. According to Dawn who have led the way in their media coverage as seen here, workers have removed more than 130,000 cubic yards (100,000 cubic meters) of debris with officials hoping the spillway will be open by mid-April.
A media report carried in The National sheds more light on the challenge of saving Hunza from the flash flood and it is shared below:
Race to Save Pakistan’s Shangri-La Valley from Devasting Flash Flood
Army engineers are battling against time and the threat of seismic shakes to save a 500km stretch of northern Pakistan from being devastated by a potential flash flood. The threat has been building since January 4, when a massive landslide temporarily dammed a river in the mountainous area of Hunza, widely believed to be the inspiration for the fictional kingdom of Shangri-La, creating a lake that continues to rise steadily.
The landslide removed 120 metres of mountainside, destroyed the village of Ata-abad, killing 19 residents, isolated 25,000 residents upriver from the landslide-dam, and severed a two-kilometre stretch of the Karakorum Highway, Pakistan’s only land link with China. The temporary lake, fed by glacia meltwaters, has since grown dramatically, and now stretches 15km back from the blockage, and is more than 70 metres deep.
Engineers of the army’s Frontier Works Organisation have been working since last month on the construction of a spillway that authorities hope will gradually drain the water.Scientists said the lake could grow to 20km in length by the onset of summer as, from April onwards, rising temperatures would significantly increase glacial melt and water flow into the lake. Although the scientists, who have surveyed the site, have endorsed the engineers’ strategy, they warn that the instability of the dam made the eventual outcome unpredictable and potentially disastrous. The 900-metre-long mass of landslide debris that formed the dam is largely made up of powder-like sediments.
David Petley, director of the International Landslide Centre at Durham University in the United Kingdom said: “The most likely scenario is that the water will flow over the dam when it reaches the top. The other scenario is that the overflow could wash away the top of the dam, after which there would be rapid erosion and collapse. It’s very difficult to forecast, “it would be a prudent conclusion to assume the worst when the water reaches the top, at which point it would be sensible to evacuate all the people downstream”. He stressed that a flash flood was “by no means an inevitability”, but historical evidence and a report submitted by Nespak, a state engineering firm, have highlighted the potential for disaster.
The National Disaster Management Authority, which is overseeing recovery efforts in Hunza, has told local legislators that the collapse of the dam would send a 20-metre-high tsunami-like flash flood crashing down the Hunza Valley. In that event, the water would sweep down from an altitude of nearly 2,500 metres, being replenished by first the Gilgit River and then the Indus, before hurtling down the narrow northern stretches of the Indus Valley towards the Tarbela Dam, 40km north-west of Islamabad. British colonial records from the 19th century report that two similar incidents caused flash floods that killed several thousand people and inundated huge areas of modern Pakistan.
The force of the flash flood would wreak catastrophic damage, destroying all communities and infrastructure, including most of the Karakorum Highway, a marvel of modern engineering built between 1966 and 1978 that ended centuries of isolation for the people of the region, now known as Gilgit-Baltistan, the scientists said.
The region is also among the most seismically active in the world because it is located at the junction of the Asian and Indian geological plates, where the Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindu Kush mountain ranges meet. Much of it sits upon an island plate squeezed between the two continental landmasses, when they collided hundreds of millions of years ago.
The danger of a massive landslide at Ata-abad had been apparent since February 2003, when a huge crack appeared in the terrain four months after an earthquake hit the region, the officials said. Authorities have since been urging residents to relocate, but they have refused to move unless they were provided with alternative residential and farming land.
Officials, backed by community-based non-government organisations sponsored by the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Hunza’s predominantly Ismaili population, finally persuaded people living at higher altitudes to move just days before the landslide.
The weight of evidence last week prompted Hameed-ullah Jan Afridi, Pakistan’s environment minister, to order preparation of an emergency plan, including mass evacuations. “Preparations must start immediately,” he said in an official statement. However, local politicians said the government had wasted vital time dithering, unwisely focusing all initially on relief efforts and issuing unrealistic estimates on how long it would take to remove the debris before finally deciding who would undertake the mammoth task.
Nazir Sabir, a local politician and Pakistan’s premier mountaineer, said: “There were serious errors in understanding the longer-term threats posed by the artificial lake and formulating a strategy based on the right perspective. “There was too much bureaucracy, both in terms of decision making and assignment of blame [for the landslide], for due attention to be paid to the complicated process of debris removal.”
David Petley featured in the article above, is a landslide expert from Britain’s Durham University who has advised the Pakistani government and has visited Hunza in recent days. Indeed he continues to monitor the landslide via his personal blog and readers can follow it here. Pamir Times is another source of information being a blog focused entirely on Gilgit-Baltistan. Indeed it has the best and most updated news and readers can follow it here.
It is time for urgent action on the part of the federal government who must tackle this issue on a priority basis. It is also a time to pray for Hunza and her people some of whom have perished already owing to the landslide. Pakistanis inside and outside of Pakistan must work together to raise our voices to force the go-slow Gilani government into urgent action to save Hunza and Pakistan and do so quickly, for time is not on our side.
Hunza Lake- destroy it before to save Tarabala Dam
↓ Quote | Posted March 25, 2010, 12:42 pmby
Arshad H Abbasi
ahabasi@gmail.com
It was in the 3rd week of July 2004, while traveling toward Khunjerab, that we stayed for a few hours at Atabad . The locals drew our attention towards a ‘crack’ in the slope above their village. The crack approx 1 1/2feet wide also passed through some of the hamlets. It was generally felt, that the November 2002 earthquake caused this crack, while some felt that the heavy snow accumulation of glaciers could have put pressure on the slope. Authorities were informed by the locals of the crack, which kept on widening, but no one took notice of it. I personally felt, that if no remedial measures are taken, this huge chunk of mountain side would one day slide into the river. No interest was shown at any level, and ignored was the willingness of the local people to be shifted to the Punjab.
It was most disturbing therefore, when on 4th January 2010 the news came, that the mountainside had actually collapsed. 13 people dead and a steadily rising artificial lake, upstream of the blockage, continues to inundate vast stretches of agricultural lands, orchards and home, the only source of livelihood for thousands of people. The increasing water pressure has the potentials of breaching the massive debris, which has dammed the natural flow of the Hunza River for 2 km, if rapid preventive measures are not undertaken. The effect a sudden breach would have downstream is unimaginable, as the Tarbela Dam is the backbone of Pakistan’s economy, its agriculture and hydropower. Due to the loose nature of the debris which at its lowest point is 100m above the riverbed and the absence of controlled spillway, this landslide dams may fail without any warning and can carry massive sediment (debris) with it. A common failure scenario may occur with a variety of failure processes that includes overtopping, seepage and sudden sliding caused by piping but there is greatly that it would surely burst.
As the debris blocking the Hunza River is mainly fine-grained material, boulders and pebbles which do not have the capacity to support this dam much longer, especially since piping has already started. It is not unknown, that a force of water can destabilize massive deposits and cause extreme devastation downstream.
The Indus River is one of the world’s largest rivers in term of water sediment loads and this massive debris (sedimentation) would have serious impact on theTarbala Dam, as it could completely dislodging the vast delta which dramatically expanded over the past decades at the mouth of the Indus. Should the dam created by the debris breach, it is said, that flash floods with a height of between 60 to 80 feet would create disaster along the embankments of the Indus River.
In other countries, risk analysis study would immediately have been undertaken by a team comprising Remote Sensing, GIS, Hydrology and Risk Management experts to quantify the potential risk in case of a breach in the artificial lake/dam. There is a urgent need to develop a high-resolution digital terrain model (DTM) to determine longitudinal profiles and cross-sections of the river at 500 meters interval up to Junction of Hunza and Gilgit River and than through to Besham Qila. Simultaneously a team of Metrological Department and WAPDA, needs to conduct a quick but comprehensive study using remote sensing images, digital elevation and housing data, hydrological and spatial analyses to quantify the potential risk in terms of affected population size and estimated property losses.
Emphasis needs to be placed on the characteristics of the breach, i.e. the geometry of a possible breach and how long it would take to develop needs to be formulated. Different types of dams tend to collapse in different ways and hence breach characteristics have to be defined first. If this dam/lake isl not thoroughly assess and properly disposed of, it would be catastrophe for downstream areas including a great threat to Trabala Dam.
The loose nature of Attabad-Hunza landslide and with the absence of controlled spillway, this landslide dam may fail without any warning and can lead to downstream flooding with massive sediment (debris) flow. A common failure scenario could occur by overtopping, seepage and sudden sliding through excessive piping. Priority needs therefore be given to engineered breaching with precise technique to control sediment flow consider, before we have another “Zalzal Lake”. The “Zalzal Lake” was formed due to earthquake-2005 in Azad Kashmir and on February 09, 2010 its sudden failure caused water flooding onto the lower areas.
The best model for our experts is the case of the Tangjiashan Lake. It was created during 2008 Sichuan earthquake in a extremely rugged terrain of Tangjiashan Mountain in China. The water was level rising at the rate of 8 feet day. When the capacity of lake was reached more than 200000 acre-feet Chinese engineers, scientists, and army considered three options. One was to use engineering techniques, including blasting, to release the water. The second was to reinforce the dam during the flood season. The third was to restructure the quake lake into a reservoir. All three schemes had evaluated after the speedy risk analysis study, including development of a high-resolution digital terrain model (DTM). After assessing all threats more than 250,000 people had been evacuated from downstream area in anticipation of the Tangjiashan Lake dam bursting.
In May 2008, before start of flood season it was finally decided to breach the dam. Chinese army took ten days to drain water from the lake. Chinese army engineers used recoil-less guns, bazookas and dynamite to blast boulders and other obstructions in the channel and final massive blasts broke through the “bottleneck” in the spillway, the water outflow speeded up drastically. So the Tangjiashan Lake was emptied thus succeeded to eliminate a huge threat of a disaster.
The need of the hour is to predict and avert colossal losses in landslide prone areas of Pakistan, a comprehensive landslide hazard analysis and mapping ought to prepare at the earliest. Who will do it? For this Government has to transform Nation Disaster Management Authority into a proactive organization.
It is really depressing to note that despite nature’s clear warnings, there was no concrete step taken to avert the impeding disaster. Even after the disaster struck all the precious time was wasted in political manipulations and in trying to become champions of so called democracy (read license to loot this country). In the end the same old tried organ of state, the Pak Army, was called in which through its unnerving efforts pulled out the stranded and helpless people. thereafter too, till the issue became a real disaster in making, only then the bigwigs of fateful country paid heed to the woes of commoners. Need of the hour is pragmatic and objective oriented approach to the problem. As indicated in the above news article as well, the evacuation must start immediately. In my opinion, Governemtn should hire top of the line consultants from home and abroad to get the possible solutions on war footings. I am pretty sure that the “ABLE” lawmakers of this region would not be comprehending the monstrous effects this breach, if it occurs, will be bringing in its wake. There is no electricity in the country and the downtown Pakistan is facing a really fierce shortage of water for agriculture so if God forbids there is a scenario of dam break of Tarbela, then God help Pakistan.
↓ Quote | Posted April 12, 2010, 11:48 amASSALAM O ALAIKUM ALL once again.
This scripture is in conjunction with my previously written piece. i wanted to clarify / correct some of the observations i made in my previous post. Firstly, i can say very confidently and after having gone through all the factual data that i have had access to, that there is definately a sense of correction at higher echelons of our government. the detailed dam break studies that different agencies have undertaken (both local and international) have clearly shown that the magnitude of catastrophy which we thought would be clossal is not that much alarming. yes there are going to be some losses and a lot of inconvenience but not of the scale at which we all were fearing. the latest softwares and other modelling techniques used by the analysts who undertook different studies suggest that the damage would be of localised nature and with effective planning and considerable early warning (which SURELY is in process) large scale human damage can be averted. However, the loss to material (bridges, roads and other ancillary structures) would be great but then considering the size of outburst that is the like accepting the lesser devil. a word of advice here as well, that we the common people should also act responsibally and pay heed to different warnings / advisory service notices issued by the authorties, meaning thereby that we should stay away from the expected areas prone to be struct by water. In this way we can not only save our ownselves, our precious and hard earned belongings but also we can make the task of different agencies working to mitigate the effects of this disaster.
↓ Quote | Posted April 16, 2010, 7:41 amThere have to be some approach to prevent these natural disastor from happening…we must think ahead of each risk, at least we should do what we ought to be doing…
↓ Quote | Posted April 16, 2010, 3:24 pm[...] Hunza and Pakistan more widely as forewarned in my earlier post of March and shared again here. The sudden interest in the Hunza dam lake from the esteemed offices of the Prime Minister, [...]
↓ Quote | Posted May 11, 2010, 10:06 pmDo not expect anything from this government. Our experience is that any measures if at all they take are cosmetic.
↓ Quote | Posted May 14, 2010, 8:20 pmHaving said that let me suggest that people themselves have to organise themselves to sole their problems:
Have your own leadership
Make groups with specific tasks
Arrange organised migration of people to safer areas
Cosult those who know better
Arrange for safety and security of the migrants
Arrange for their health coverage
Ask for cooperation
There are good people ready to help.
AoA. Dr. Muhammad very rightly said that we should help ourselves in order to expect any help from Allah (SWT). Do hell with this burocratic attitude. We just need a leader. We have already got the best of people and minds. May Allah(SWT) bless us with some good leader who is a true follower of Qur’aan & Sunnah or at least having qualities like Muhammad Ali Jinnah had.
↓ Quote | Posted May 20, 2010, 9:57 ami m rawalpindi but our heart are in hunza.we all preay,s for him that allah gives them a lot power to defend at this movement.ameen
↓ Quote | Posted May 20, 2010, 4:51 pmALL I WANT TO SAY IS I AM A VICTIM OF THIS TRAGEDY….. I AM VERY VERY ASTONISHED TO SEE NOT A SINGLE DETAIL IN THE TV OR THE DAILY NEWSPAPERS ABOUT THE SERIOUSNESS AND TERRORS IN THE NORTH REGARDING THIS ISSUE. I LOST MY FAMILY AND HOME AND THIS BLOODY GOVERNMENT CANNOT RETURN THIS. ALL I SAY IS ALLAH DESTROY THIS GOVERNMENT, AND ALL ITS MEMEBRS AS THIS IS IN ALL MEANS REASON FOR THIS DESTRUCTION AND IGNORANCE AND I REALLY CANNOT HELP NOT TO SAY ALL THIS. WHEN YOU LOOSE YOUR FATHER, MOTHER AND YOUNG BROTHER (5) YEARS OLD BEFORE YOUR EYES AND SEE NOTHING BEING DONE TO PREVENT HUNDREDS OF OTHERS FROM JOINGIN MY LIST THEN ALL I CAN SAY IS DEATH TO OUR GOVERNMENT ALSO.
↓ Quote | Posted May 26, 2010, 7:38 am[...] Hunza may have left the front page news in recent days losing out to Cyclone Phet and the budget. The human cost of Hunza can be felt in the words of Atif, who left a heartrending comment on how the Hunza landslide dam has destroyed his life. This post is dedicated to Atif and the countless and also nameless people of Hunza who have suffered due to the apathy of our ruling elite. Readers are invited to hear Hunza’s Atif today: [...]
↓ Quote | Posted June 7, 2010, 5:09 pmI want to ask Dr. Mohammed Afzal Khan if he was ever in St. Gregory’s High School in Dhaka? Thanks for the reply either way.
↓ Quote | Posted July 30, 2010, 3:42 pmits very important article i know about it but it necessary to know more people thanks for publish this informative article
↓ Quote | Posted January 18, 2011, 2:59 pm