CWC failed to forecast, alert about floods

Hundreds of lives could have been saved from the Uttarakhand floods had the flood forecasting division of the Central Water Commission (CWC) predicted the impending disaster. Worse, with Polarimetric C Band Doppler radars for Uttarakhand capable of predicting cloud bursts stuck for five years, the tragedy was waiting to happen.

The CWC has a flood forecasting management division that was completely oblivious to the floods that occurred in Uttarakhand on June 15-16. This was due to the lack of flood prediction sites at the most vulnerable areas such as Kedarnath, Badrinath, Uttarkashi, Harsil, which could have yielded warnings in time to save lives. Currently the CWC has sites only at Rishikesh, Haridwar and Srinagar, which failed to predict the disaster. A detailed analysis by the NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) noticed this major lacuna over several weeks.

“Despite huge rainfall in the catchment areas for several days, the CWC was oblivious to this threat and only predicted a rise in water levels in Rishikesh and Haridwar,” Himanshu Thakkar of SANDRP told dna. In fact, between June 2-7, the CWC website was not functioning and it took repeated calls and emails from SANDRP for them to realise that the website was down.

This was confirmed to dna by VD Roy, the director of the food forecasting management division of the CWC. “Yes, it is true that our site was down for a few days due to technical reason,” he said. As for the lack of forecasts in Uttarakhand, he said that this was “not feasible because the warning would have been available for only a few hours.”

Thakkar rejected this argument. “This is a very lame excuse not to have sites in the most vulnerable areas,” he said. “Even a few hours of advance warning can make a massive difference in saving lives. The CWC functions callously as is apparent by its false prediction of a massive flood in the Brahmaputra this month. Had this actually occurred, all of Assam would have submerged.”

Shockingly, even cloud bursts that led to this massive tragedy could have been predicted had the government procured the Doppler radars. “These were sanctioned in 2008 but the state government did nothing and the central government and the NDMA just sat on it,” Dr SK Srivastava, former director general of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) told dna. These radars can give at least a three-hour advance warning for a cloud burst. “Such radars along with a flood warning system could have saved the thousands who died this time,” Srivastava told dna.

He was shocked when told that former Uttarakhand chief ministers BC Khanduri and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank and the current National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) chairman Shashidhar Reddy feigned ignorance about the radars. “I was disgusted that they didn’t know that this project has been pending for years. Two sites in Mussoorie and Nainital had also been identified and the money sanctioned, but they did nothing,” he said.