Bonfire Chain Warns Indians of Dam Breaking

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7068, 30 January 1933, Page 5

Bonfire Chain Warns Indians of Dam Breaking

STEPS BEING- TAKEN TO PROTECT NATIVES. DELHI. Engineers who for sis years have been keeping watch over the formation of a lake amidst the snow-cove Ted Himalayan ranges, 16,000 feet above sea level in what is known as the ‘Roof of the World,’ where the 1800-mile In- | dus River has its source, have reported that the Shyok ice dam that holds back the water has begun to give way. A 150-milc chain of bonfires right through the gorges has been lighted as a signal to tens of thousands of villagers to trek out of the way of the flood as it sweeps down the steep, narrow, winding channel which the river lias chiselled for itself through the mountains. . The railav bridge over the Indus River at Attock, <SOO miles down stream from Shyok, had been strengthened in advance to withstand the torrent. Preparations had also been made at Ino great irrigation works at Sukkur, 500 miles further south, to meet the ex- [ pected flood, though here the difficulty was expected to be less, owing to the water spreading itself out over vast shallow reaches in the plains on the way. The Shyok dam was formed in 1926, owing to a neighbouring glacier obtruding itself into the Indus gorge, blocking the river and forming a barrier 500 feet high and over 1000 feet thick. A lake nearly ten miles long and 100 feet deep gradually formed above the dam. The lake rose to the top of the dam in 192 S but a crack formed through which the water escaped without much damage. A bigger break-through occurred in 1929, when | hundreds of millions of tons of water ! were released and swept away a numI ber of villages. Such incidents have happened periodically in the past. In 1811 a Sikh army at Attack is said to have been swept away. In ISSS a flood on the Indus so penned back the tributary river from Kabul that a whole cantonment was wrecked. Himalayan villagers everywhere arc* intensely alive to what the blocking of a stream in any of their gorges means. One of them, when taken to Calcutta, where for the first time lie saw the tide flowing up the Ganges, ran shouting away, thinking that although lie was then in the plains,, a flood even tlicrs might follow.