Rangamati Landslide
Rebuilding lives using indigenous wisdom
It's been a month since heavy torrential downpours caused a landslide and mudflow in the hill districts of Rangamati, Chittagong and Cox's Bazar that took 160 lives and destroyed homes, roads and highways. Thousands of people both indigenous and Bengali are still homeless. They are currently living in government offices and schools that were turned into shelters after the disaster with little hope of returning home anytime soon.
I spent a week in Rangamati after the disaster. In the Rangapani area of the town, I met Ratan Chakma (38) and his 70-year-old father Dibendra Prasad Chakma, who were working hard to remove the piled up mud from inside their home. The mudflow was so strong that it tore apart two side-walls of the building and filled up to five feet of all the rooms to literally bury the furniture. This is what the mudflow did to a full-fledged building. Just beside Ratan's home, two other buildings went under four to five feet deep mud, killing two sisters from the Chakma community and their three children and one unborn baby. About a mile away in the Vedvedi Muslim Para, behind the Loknath temple, at least 60 tin-shed houses were washed away by the flood, killing 26 people. In Shimultoli, Vedvedi and Rangapani areas of the town, bits and pieces of houses can still be seen here and there. Some houses are half buried in mud.
Ratan Chakma and his family have rented a house close to their original residence. However, not all the landslide victims could afford such amenity. At least 2,500 people have been sleeping in the 19 makeshift shelters. While many of these people have completely lost their homes, many others have left their houses fearing further landslides. According to an estimate by the district administration, 1,231 houses were completely devastated and 9,537 houses partially damaged by the landslide.
As the victims continue living in the government buildings hampering their operation, a more permanent housing solution is yet to be in sight. The additional deputy commissioner of Rangamati, Prakash Kanti Chowdhury, informed me that until the rainy season is over, it is highly unlikely that the affected people will be able to return to a place they can call home. The number of people living in the shelters rises up to 3,600 when there is a heavy rainfall. Although the educational institutions used as shelters have reopened after Eid, the administration can't close the shelters yet, nor can they go for a more permanent solution until the rain stops, said the ADC.
After the landslide hit the CHT, many in the media and civil society representatives concluded that hill-cutting was responsible for the disaster. While hill-cutting did trigger such landslides in the past, especially in Chittagong, this was not the case for the Rangamati landslide. In fact, this theory, widely discussed in television and print media, caused significant irritation among the local people of Rangamati, since most of the affected hills were uncut and even untouched for years. This is indeed a case of extreme weather event, aggravated by a loss of forest cover and the comparatively new phenomenon of living dangerously on the cleavages of hills.
The amount of rainfall recorded at the Rangamati weather station located in Vedvedi, which is incidentally the most affected landslide zone, was extraordinary. About 343mm of rain was recorded in 24 hours starting from 6am on June 12, leading to the landslide. A senior observer at the station, Kaychingno Marma, told me that he did not record such a great amount of rainfall during his 10 years of service in Rangamati as well as the earlier 10 years in Cox's Bazar. The total amount of rainfall on June 12-14, 2017 was 542 mm, which was greater than the recorded rainfall in the whole month of June 2016 (513 mm) and in June 2015 (540 mm). The hills just melted and turned into rivers of mud that engulfed houses and croplands located in the cleavages of the hills.
Goutam Dewan, president of CHT Nagorik Committee, gave me new insights into the disaster. He pointed out that with Rangamati being overpopulated, more and more people nowadays are building houses under the hills, and along grew the vulnerability. He said a good distance must be kept between the houses in the hills, but the new inhabitants did not follow this norm.
With the climate changing globally, such extreme weather events are well predicted by the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As rainfall has visibly increased in Bangladesh in recent years, we need to prepare for more such hazards. Torrential rainfall can't be stopped, but we can stop deforestation and hill-cutting. Altering the natural environment of CHT for profiteering has been going on for decades. The reprisal of nature is turning out to be deadly. Even teak monoculture on the hills could not stop the landslide. In Sapchhari, where the Chittagong-Rangamati highway was completely destroyed, there is a thick teak plantation and it could not stop the landslide, possibly because of the fact that teak trees hamper undergrowth by acidifying the soil beneath, so the soil is mostly exposed to rain despite the plantation. Apparently, nothing less than a dense natural forest cover can protect the hill people from the onslaught of such heavy rains. We have destroyed enough of our natural forests in the CHT, it's high time we regenerated it. Besides, a more prudent housing practice must be enforced. For example, traditional platform houses built by indigenous communities allow mud water to flow through the pillars while modern houses just block it and eventually get devastated.
While it's a great tragedy to lose so many people due to landslide, it also prompts us to rethink the idea of development and perceived economic benefit at the cost of natural environment, and pushes us to rebuild better and safer, using indigenous knowledge and in harmony with nature.
Md Ashraful Haque works with the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD). Email: TanimAshraf@live.com