“No, no, I will not go inside the house. There are ghosts in there,” cries three-year-old Rinchen Lama every time her parents try to enter the building they called home before the 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Sikkim on September 18. “She’s terrified,” says her father, Suraj Lama, who works in the administrative office of All India Radio in Gangtok. “There was a deafening sound and the room started shaking violently. The walls were cracking right in front of our eyes and then the lights went out. It was like a horror film. My daughter thinks it will happen again.” For many who experienced the quake, the events of September 18 refuse to fade as each day brings in more reports of casualties and damage.
As Outlook went to press, the death toll was at 117. As many as nine north Sikkim villages, with a total population of 1,000, are still out of reach after the quake, which lasted 30-40 seconds and whose epicentre was about 68 kilometres northwest of Gangtok. Many workers at the 1,200 MW Teesta Urja dam are feared buried under construction debris and mountain rubble. Sixteen workers in the Teesta’s upper reaches have reportedly been killed by the quake that hit the site. As rescue agencies try to reach untouched areas, the power supply continues to be erratic even in Gangtok and prices of essential supplies have increased manifold across the state. Sikkim CM Pawan Chamling, meanwhile, has estimated the loss at about Rs 1 lakh crore.
Seismologists called the quake a readjustment of the stress accumulating under Sikkim’s surface. Quakes in this region are caused by the gradual thrusting between the India plate, consisting largely of the subcontinent, and the Eurasian plate comprising Tibet and China among others. While the pace at which the India plate pushes into the Eurasian one has been estimated to be anywhere between 22 mm to 50 mm per year, it varies at different points. Supriyo Mitra, a seismologist at Calcutta’s Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, says the plate below Sikkim moves more forcefully against the Eurasian plate than does the portion of the plate under Nepal. “So, the 6.9 quake was a kind of readjustment where Sikkim moved a little southward with respect to Nepal. The big quake in turn caused stress in Sikkim, which led to the two other quakes that followed,” he says.
Casualty Volunteers carry a victim’s body in Chungthang
A paper published in 2010 in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America by a team of scientists from the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad had explained how most earthquakes in the Sikkim Himalayas occur because of blocks slipping past each other along a north-south fracture zone in the earth’s crust unlike the predominant thrust mechanism along east-west fractures in the rest of the Himalayas. It also forecast a “greater likelihood of an impending large earthquake” in Sikkim by studying past quakes and data from 11 seismic stations in the state. “Except that we did not see it happening in a year’s time,” says N. Purnachandra Rao, one of the six authors of the paper.
Many hope for a scientific miracle that would allow predictions of quakes but others argue it is a futile exercise. “Instead, we ought to focus on quake-resistant buildings and retrofitting existing structures to withstand quakes,” Mitra says. Sikkim has undergone a reckless construction spree with complete disregard for the state’s earthquake-propensity. Once known for its traditional wooden houses, Sikkim today is littered with multi-storey concrete buildings that are death traps during major quakes. The Teesta Urja dam is another example of such nonchalance. Five years ago, the dam was strongly opposed by some groups, including the Affected Citizens of Teesta, who argued against its construction in a region known to be quake-prone. “Quake-resistant engineering of dams becomes more crucial as rivers tend to be guided along the earth’s faultlines,” Mitra says. “One should do a lot of assessments before putting a dam in a place like Sikkim and if you do, you have to do all you can to build it to survive a quake.”
A large number of construction workers and labourers associated with the dam were “submerged under the stream of rocks, stones, pebbles and boulders cascading down the mountain”, says the PWD’s Binoy Das, who fled to Siliguri. A friend working on the project and his wife are missing, he adds. “We’re getting frantic calls from their family in Calcutta. How long can we wait?” Back in Gangtok, Ritu, a truck driver who narrowly escaped being crushed by a rock-and-boulder avalanche, told Outlook, “I saw people and cars being crushed under falling rocks. I don’t know how I survived. I somehow made my way into the forests and walked back in a daze.” It took him three days to reach Mangan. He never wants to go back up north again.
Besides the lack of smart urban planning and the enforcement of quake-resistant architecture norms, the Sikkim quake has also exposed our shaky preparedness. The National Disaster Rescue Force (NDRF) team deployed from Bagdogra to quake-hit areas arrived only after the crucial first 36 hours had elapsed. Moreover, the state authorities had no preparation and rescue plan at the ready. The same is true for other parts of the country. “It is a fact that most of the states have no state disaster rescue force (SDRF) in place. What we have been stressing for long is that the SDRF is the base to build a quick response team. While the NDRF joins in later, the SDRF can start relief operations immediately,” says NDMA vice-chairman M. Shashidhar Reddy. As a final toll of the tragedy emerges, many in Sikkim and elsewhere in India wonder fatalistically when the next big one will strike and how well-prepared they will be to survive it.
By Dola Mitra and Debarshi Dasgupta with inputs from Chandrani Banerjee
