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#THE INNKEEPERS TORRENT DRIVER#

There are also job, technology, and durable economic benefits from building big dams and power stations. India and China see in hydro development an opportunity to diversify their electric-production sector, reduce their reliance on climate-changing coal, and develop cleaner energy sources. The Himalayas are viewed as a prime hydroelectric production region: valleys are tight here, water is abundant, and rivers fall fast and with immense kinetic energy.Ĭhina also has a big hydro development program underway on the other side of these big, unstable, treacherous mountains. Though I have plenty of questions about policy and dam design that I am looking to answer this week in Delhi, it seems to me that what happened in June, and what continues to unfold along the Mandakini and the Alaknanda rivers, has implications for more of Asia and the rest of the world.

A fourth dam - also under construction, but higher up the river - was completely pulverized and washed away.

Reinforcement bars, bent like wind-whipped wheat, now form a tangled thatch of steel at the base of two broken support columns.

A third dam, under construction, was seriously battered by the Mandakini River’s flood waters and the boulders that were pushed along at the speed of a livestock stampede.

A second dam was damaged by silt from the flood tide that poured into its powerhouse and fouled its generating turbines.

One dam was buried under boulders and rubble on the upper Alaknanda River.

There are – or were – 15 operating projects in Uttarakhand before the flood. India already has 186 operating hydro projects that account for a bit less than 15 percent of the country’s electrical generating capacity. It’s the latter that prompted this trip to the Himalayas, where India says that it wants to build the bulk of the 292 new hydroelectric power projects that are either already under construction or are proposed for the region. This year, we want to dig deeper into India’s coal production and consumption cycles, its solar and wind sectors, and its ambitious program of hydroelectric development. In our Choke Point: India reporting from last summer, I wrote about India’s cycle of risk, which involves surplus grain production in western states and rising coal production in the east. Downriver, a dam that had been under construction was washed away. Much of Sonprayag, along the Mandakini River in northern India, was buried in the rubble of a Himalayan flood in June.

Over the last three years, we’ve collaborated on our Global Choke Point project in an attempt to understand and relay how nations are responding to the resource confrontations that now define so much of our economy and our global condition: the rising demand for food and energy in an era of diminishing freshwater reserves. I’m here on assignment for Circle of Blue and our partner, the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum. I’m back in India for a month, just as I was at this time in 2012. Dozens of one-way-in, one-way-out towns and several larger cities were cut off for weeks, supplied with food and fuel by the Indian army. Entire sides of mountains slid into rivers, and with them came whole sections of mountain highways. On June 16 and June 17, the mountains unleashed such fury that four towns on two rivers – the Mandakini and the Alaknanda – were washed away. These are the principle metaphors in the Himalayas. Steep mountains fast moving water active towns. I’ve come to understand the consequences of a flood in June that, according to researchers at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, trapped and killed as many as 30,000 Hindu pilgrims during days of terror.

#THE INNKEEPERS TORRENT DRIVER#

The current poured over gravel and boulders, the sound of it rising out of the tight valley like a beast’s heavy breathing.įor five long days, I have traversed this region of the Himalayas in the company of Dhruv Malhotra, a young New Delhi-based photographer, and Vinod, a professional driver who was raised in the hills.

The lower slopes, terraced by generations, dove to the fast-moving Mandakini River. The 21,000-foot Sumeru summit was lit up by the sun, turning the rock and snow from pink to orange to white.

At dawn, we awoke to strong black coffee. The innkeeper - anxious for guests in a travel economy that came to a standstill in mid-June - cooked dal and nan for dinner and then showed us to a room that was unlit and unheated. OKUND, UTTARAKHAND, India - We made the crossing at night from Chamoli, reaching the Himalayan foothill town of Okund after dark. North of Rampur, along the Mandakini River in northern India, the 25,000-foot snow peaks of the Himalayas reach higher than any of the world’s mountain summits.