Landslide in Dharchula | 04 Jul 2024

Recently, A severe landslide has completely blocked the road to Dharchula in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand.

Due to heavy rain, six highways and 96 roads are closed in Uttarakhand. Landslides have blocked 47 rural roads.

Heavy rainfall causes landslides and accidents, posing a significant challenge for Uttarakhand every monsoon.
- In 2023, nearly 100 people died and many went missing from June to September.
The CM Pushkar Dhami called for a safety audit of all transformers during the monsoon and urged for rapid development of industrial institutions in the state to boost power generation.

A landslide is defined as the movement of a mass of rock, debris, or earth down a slope.
They are a type of mass wasting, which denotes any downward movement of soil and rock under the direct influence of gravity.
The term landslide encompasses five modes of slope movement: falls, topples, slides, spreads, and flows.
Causes:
- Slope movement occurs when forces acting downward (mainly due to gravity) exceed the strength of the earth materials that compose the slope.
- Landslides are caused due to three major factors: geology, morphology, and human activity.
  - Geology refers to characteristics of the material. The earth or rock might be weak or fractured, or different layers may have different strengths and stiffness.
  - Morphology refers to the structure of the land. For example, slopes that lose their vegetation to fire or drought are more vulnerable to landslides.
    - Vegetation holds soil in place, and without the root systems of trees, bushes, and other plants, the land is more likely to slide away.
  - Human activity which includes agriculture and construction increases the risk of a landslide.
Landslide-Prone Areas:
- The entire Himalayan tract, hills/mountains in sub-Himalayan terrains of North-east India, Western Ghats, the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu Konkan areas are landslide-prone.