Tourist sites, flash floods are on a collision course

IT'S ONE OF the world's fastest-growing tourist sites, attracting more visitors than the Statue of Liberty, the Tower of London, or Pompeii. It's also one of the locations most at risk from devastating natural disasters as our planet warms.

- Bloomberg

The Chota Char Dham, a circuit of four of the most sacred Hindu sites in the foothills of the Himalayas, has grown in recent years to become one of the biggest annual pilgrimages. With more than four million visitors every year, it attracts about 10 times as many religious tourists as Spain's Camino de Santiago, and roughly twice as many as the Hajj in Mecca.

It's also become the site of a grimmer spectacle: Flash flooding and landslides, as unchecked development in rapidly-thawing mountain valleys turns ever-intensifying rainstorms into avalanches of mud, rock, and water. In the state of Uttarakhand, at least four have died and dozens more are feared trapped or lost after one such cloudburst this week swept away much of the village of Dharali.

There's a horrible inevitability about the location. The Chota Char Dham is considered sacred because it takes pilgrims to shrines associated with the many tributaries of the Ganges, which rises in Gangotri, just upstream from this week's disaster. Those waters in turn are fed by steep-sided river valleys, and ultimately by glaciers that have shrunk about 40% since pre-industrial times.

Those local conditions and the unchecked development from a soaring tourist trade are fast making the region synonymous with catastrophes.