Dehradun:
Could pilgrims and tourists have been evacuated in time to avoid the monsoon fury in Kedarnath? The Uttarakhand Met department claims that warnings of very heavy rain, unusual for this time of the year, were issued two days ahead of deluge. Warnings, that were accompanied by an advisory that the Char dham Yatra should be deferred by a few days.
Anand Sharma, head of the Met Department in Dehradun told NDTV, "we were predicting heavy rains from 14th onward and we had informed the State Government and on 15th again we had issued the warnings with possibility of very heavy rains and landslides. And we had also said that people should not go to the hills, should not venture into the hills and people in the hills should move to safer places as landslides are expected. We also mentioned in the forecast, which we say Chaar dham forecast... postpone the yatra by four days on the 15 and from 16th postpone it by three days."
The weather department's forecast was reflected in local newspapers.
But the state administration's response was that a warning to check weather bulletins before travelling hardly conveyed the danger.
Defending the state administration's action, Subhash Kumar, Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand, said, "In my last 10-15 years we have seen many such forecasts... there are warnings of heavy rain given. There was no such specific advisory given for the yatras."
Was the Met department's warning simply treated as routine and ignored by the state administration, or is it symptomatic of a larger problem of co-ordination? While the blame game has started, the question is could precious lives have been saved in this tragedy?
On June 24, the Superintendent of Police of Rudraprayag had told NDTV, "the police did warn pilgrims to not go to the shrine area... and at Kedarnath the police took many of the pilgrims to take shelter in the temple... an action that may have saved up to 8000 lives."
While some pilgrims have acknowledged that there were local warnings, they say no one could have imagined the extent of the devastation that lay ahead. A pilgrim rescued from Badrinath, a resident of Bhopal, said she heard a number of warnings given by those co-ordinating the yatra, but pilgrims in general, refused to act on those.
So were there were clear warnings, and were they ignored?
When asked the same, Uttarakhand's Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna told reporters, "We will reply to all these questions once rehab work is done."
It's true that the incessant rain on June 16 and 17 came two weeks before the usual onset of monsoon and has been the highest in decades for this time for the year. But could a concentrated effort on following an early warning system have minimised the damage?