Though heavy rainfall is the trigger, our construction practices of where and how are the biggest causes behind some of the most devastating landslides that are costing both lives and money for us.
1/n
Image shows a relatively well vegetated hill slope in #Manipur in 2009 2/n
When a railway line was built along the slope (alongwith many roads), lots of slope cutting, vegetation clearances took place in the region.
3/n
And the construction continued..
4/n
So when heavy rainfall happened, the slope failed creating a landslide with many people dead
5/n
Similar case: New Haflong station in #Assam
Slope cutting for both the railway line and the access roads were done.
6/n
And then resulted in landslides when the place received heavy rainfall
7/n
One should note that, it is not just the slope cutting that is a problem but also with the narrow box culverts that are provided for side streams. IMO these are extremely small & would get choked which would destabilize the land above & would also overflow
8/n
And also retaining walls of this size wont work in these situations anyway.
Unless we change our construction practices of where we build & how we build with respect to slope cutting, vegetation clearance, retaining walls & most importantly culverts for streams, we would continue facing devastating landslides. It wud be another place, another time
End
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Here's a compilation of my #maps which can help you in understanding the #Bengaluru #Water situation a bit better.
Bengaluru is unofficially a hill station which is located nearly a kilometre above sea level.
Being in the top of a ridge line, the city is partly within Kaveri watershed and partly in Ponnaiyar (Dakshina Pinakini watershed).
Being on top, water from elsewhere dont flow through Bengaluru but flow outward from the city
Bengaluru right now depends on Kaveri river for water supply. Because of its height, Water is pumped for a height of 1000 feet from the river 100km away from the city
Here is the story of how @googlemaps helped me recover items stolen in a moving train from my father.
My father was travelling from Nagercoil to Trichy in sleper class in Nagercoil - Kacheguda express. He had boarded at 1:43 AM from NCJ. The train was relatively empty & another person who boarded along with my dad stole my dad's bag and mobile phone from him, and deboarded the train in Tirunelveli Junction.
When my dad realized it, he searched in the train and rang me from his friend's phone at 3:51 AM to inform that his phone was stolen. Luckily, among immediate family members we have location sharing "on" which meant I could track the location of mobile. When I checked it, I realized that the mobile was moving along the track near Melapalayam in Tirunelveli so I deduced that the thief was returning back to Nagercoil in another train.
I called my close friend Babin who is also a local DMK (@arivalayam) functionary to help me recover this. And we both went to Nagercoil station to catch the theif. The railway police listened to us and one of them came along. This is a snapshot of Google maps at the time when I was waiting railway station and the theif was still having my dad's phone.
Thread:
I'll summarise the #Chennai cyclone event and the flooding issue once again as I feel that there is a lot of misinformation floating around which could guide people and government in wrong way w.r.t future actions
#ChennaiFloods2023 1/n
1. The cyclone path had been more or less accurately predicted by IMD, private forecasters
2. The intensity of rainfall however was not clear as per official forecast though it was expected to be heavy, it was not indicated that it would be near record rainfall
3. Though private forecasters including myself had warned about the possibility of extreme nature of rainfall, there was always a doubt and it is difficult for the government to take decisions based on non-official arms like mine and it would be too much of a risk for them
I have written some threads about the flooding in Chennai, this one would focus specifically on the lake aspect.
#Map below shows the flood forecasted areas in Chennai for an extreme amount of rainfall. If we carefully look into this forecast map, we can see that apart from the major rivers, there are many other paths for the water to run which appear like a tree branching out.
This forecast based on coarser DEM with extreme rainfall & was prepared by my team mates @smkirthiga & pavithra
Pardon the visual quality of maps since I dont have much time to prepare this
If we look at the topography map, the flow paths become clearer as in the map below. When water falls in these places, they are supposed to drain along these streams which appear only during monsoons
Let us zoom in further, these "conduits" are the ones that are supposed to carry water. I have added some water flow lines on top of the topography map here near Pallkaranai wetlands
Thread:
A recent #satellite image of the sea near #Chennai's Marina beach. There are 3 dots in the image (red, green, blue). What causes it?
Satellites have cameras that observe reflection in different spectral bands (including red, green, blue). But they don't observe the same place at the same time and there is a very small lag between them. Meaning between red colour and green colour there is a time difference
Most of the objects (like buildings, lakes etc.) that satellites observe don't move that fast in microseconds and hence when image collages are created, it won't show any major difference. But what if objects like Aeroplane which move at say 800kmph is observed?
#Thread: A Problem in the making. Two major problems faced by #Bengaluru are flooding and traiffic. But just like any other Indian city, unbridled urbanization is aggravating these crises and is making sure that these problems would stay for longer 1/n
In my previous posts, I have explained about the topography and valley system in #Bengaluru. These conveyor belts carry the flood waters of the city. It is across these valleys small dams were built primarily for irrigation purpose (which we now call as lakes) 2/n
The problem is that a lot of builtup area came across these valleys. Because of the way we construct, the materials we use, and them behaving as blocks, Bengaluru began having flooding problems as the valleys got blocked 3/n