DISASTER FEARED

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 248, 15 July 1932, Page 9

DISASTER FEARED

• Great Ice-dam Bursts INDUS IN HIGH FLOOD 3 Calcutta, July 13. i The great Shyok dam, which held - back a huge artificial lake nine miles i long and half a mile wide, 17,000 feet > up the Karakoram Range, has burst, and the River Indus is in flood over 50 t feet deep, carrying wrecked buildings ' and uprooted trees. ! Fearing a repetition of the damage ’ when the dam burst in 1929, the Puu- ’ jab and Kashmir Governments have ’ ordered the evacuation of low-lying ' villages in the Indus Valley. The Shyok river is a large tributary of the Upper Indus, and rises near the south- ■ ern foot of the great pass of the Karakoram range on' the route from Leh to Yarkand. Two important streains flow south from the Karakoram, reaching one of the great longtitudinal troughs north of and parallel to the Himalaya system and the Indus-Brahmaputra line. They both : join the stream along this trough, which, flowing north-westwards, makes a sharp bend, and thus joins the Indus in Balisi tan. . Below a station called Yapehan, situated some 35 miles south of the Karakoram pass, at a junctoin of valleys, the river bed begins to encase itself in a deep, narrow gorge, in which, normally, it receives the drainage of the little ' Khumdan glacier. In 1926 this glacier I pushed its way into and across the gorge, ■ and thus built an ice-dam 4SO feet high. ‘ The ice-dammed lake above had grown to a length of nine miles, an average ■ breadth of 1000 yards, and a depth of . 25 feet by July, 1928. At the beginning of August that year the level of the water | , began to fall steadily, and on August 4, a crack in the dam had developed. ’ This caused widespread anxiety, and eja' orate beacon-signalling arrangements were improvised, and some villages below ’ were evacuated. The alarm was intensi- ! fled as a beacon fire was seen, but it proved to be lit by. a Yarkandi caravan. Subsei quent reports showed that the lake was ■ leaking slowly through the erack in the ; dam, and the danger of flood passed away. TRAIN DERAILED Delhi Terrorist Outrage Calcutta, July 13. Terrorists succeeded in derailing a train of a dozen coaches near Delhi yesterday. Two goods'wagons and one passenger coach were completely wrecked, crashing down an embankment. Eighty Indian passengers had a miraculous escape. Mr. Zarif Khan, assistant political ofiicer at Parachinar, on the NorthWest frontier, was sitting on a veranda when a Mills bomb flung at him i failed to explode. Four Sikhs who disfigured the Lahore statue of I,ord Lawrence were sentenced to two years and three months' imprisonment respectively, and were also fined.