Kishtwar Tragedy Was Years in the Making

The cloudburst in the Chenab Valley forces a question we can't keep dodging: how many warnings will it take for us to act?

- Dr. Afroz Ahmad Shah

When the cloudburst hit Kishtwar, in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir, it took just minutes for the rain to shred lives apart.

Homes vanished, roads caved in, families were swept away. Officials counted at least 65 dead and more than 100 missing, but in these calamities, the real toll usually comes later, when the water recedes and the silence sets in.

We call events like this "natural disasters," as if nature alone is to blame.

The harder truth is that we make the destruction worse, through reckless construction, weak governance, and communities left unprepared for the dangers around them.

Kishtwar is part of one of the most geologically restless regions on the planet. For 50 million years, the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates have been colliding, pushing the Himalayas upward faster than almost any other mountain range in the world.

The collision has shattered the crust into a web of faults, including the Main Central Thrust, the Main Boundary Thrust, and the Main Frontal Thrust, carving razor-sharp ridges and deep valleys where instability is built into the very bedrock.

Earthquakes are a fact of life here. The 2005 Muzaffarabad quake alone killed over 80,000 people across the region. But in the Himalayas, it's the ground sliding, not shaking, that poses the bigger danger.