Earlier this week, multiple landslides hit the Wayanad district of India’s Kerala State, killing more than 126 people and injuring hundreds of others. The landslides were caused by torrential rains that lasted for days, uprooting trees, burying villages, and cutting off roads and communication lines. State officials described it as one of the worst natural disasters Kerala has ever witnessed.
Rescue workers continue to recover and identify bodies, and with more than 180 people still missing, the death toll is likely to rise. The state government has set up temporary hospitals and shelters, and sent rations and clean water to thousands of affected residents. It declared a two-day mourning period on Tuesday.
What led to the disaster?
Wayanad is a hilly region in the northeastern part of Kerala known for its natural beauty and wildlife. A big tourist attraction, its slopes carry spice plantations and its valleys contain paddy fields.
But the elevation, the angle of the slopes, a thick bed of loose soil that sits atop hard rock and rivulets created by heavy rainfall create the perfect conditions for landslides, said S. Sreekumar, a geologist who has worked with multiple government bodies on disaster management. New construction and irrigation methods used by farmers have also compromised the natural drainage system, he said.
“There are high slopes and people are settled at the base of the slope,” Mr. Sreekumar said. Extreme and frequent rainfall owing to climate change are also “a big contributor, no doubt about that.”
Does Kerala have a lot of natural disasters?
Kerala is one of India’s most developed and populous states, with high per capita income and education levels. It is prone to natural calamities because of its topography and a heavy monsoon season. A construction boom fueled by the state’s rapid growth has also made it even more vulnerable to flooding that leads to severe damage and heavy economic losses.
More than 14 percent of Kerala’s land area is prone to floods, and for some districts, it’s as high as 50 percent.
Landslides are a major problem along the Western Ghats, a mountain range that stretches across several states and includes Wayanad and other districts in Kerala. In 2022, India’s Union Minister for Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh told the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, that Kerala recorded the highest number of landslides in the country over the previous seven years.
One of Kerala’s biggest natural disasters occurred in 2018, when heavy floods and landslides killed 500 people. The World Meteorological Organization listed it as one of five major extreme flooding events globally between 2015 and 2019.
In October 2021, Kerala witnessed the highest-ever rainfall on record for the month, according to the Kerala Disaster Management Authority. Within a roughly two-week period that month, heavy rains took 57 lives, and fully or partially damaged thousands of homes.
What can be done?
In 2011, Madhav Gadgil, an ecologist and then-chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, recommended zoning off most of the land including and surrounding Wayanad as ecologically fragile, which would curtail development activity. However, the Gadgil Report, as it came to be known, set off a controversy, with some lawmakers arguing that it was too restrictive given Kerala’s dense population.
Since this week’s disaster, there have been calls on social media and from the Indian press to implement the report’s recommendations. Other studies have called for banning construction too close to natural drains and removing blockages before the rainy season to minimize flooding.
