Disaster prevention in hill town: a case of Naharlagun town, Arunachal Pradesh/

Abstract

Disaster such as earthquakes, fire, landslide, flashflood have caused immense loss of lives, and property. It has hindered and slowed down the process of infrastructure development in Naharlagun, Arunachal Pradesh. Naharlagun town is prone to disasters such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, etc. Arunachal Pradesh has experienced high magnitude earthquakes in 1941, 1947, 1950, and several earthquakes thereafter. Naharlagun too has faced major flashfloods during 1961, 1994, 2001, 2004, 2008, 2014 and now flashfloods are occurringin a regular phenomenon. Arunachal Pradesh is among one of the highest receiving rainfall zones in the world receiving 2500-3000mm average annually.The Landslides and Floods in Naharlagun occur majorly due to the prevailinggeo morphologic, topographical and hydro-metrological features. Its declining forest cover had led to erosion of productive agriculture/ horticulture fields. The entire area is under high active seismic zone V. Naharlagun felt tremors of low magnitude from time to time, which results in soil loosening and occurrence of gaps in the hilly slopes. This triggers landslide during monsoon season. The study area is located in the highly fragile mountain land where the condition of environment and the ecological risks of resource utilization are closely associated with each together.The uncontrolled unplanned rapid growth of population in Naharlagun has increased burden on the natural resources and thus creating consequent danger on degradation of environment. Particularly a boom in population pressure puts the population at risk from a natural event. And because of rigorous earth cutting for construction of new road, buildings have decreased the strength of the. Regolith cover and has made the slopes more exploitable to slope failure. This study aims to propose for disaster prevention measures in hill town. The main focus of this study is on landslide and flashflood/flood in the environmental vulnerability neighborhood. This study has three objectives, (i) is to map the vulnerability in the study area (municipal ward wise) where the disaster affected areas and disaster-prone areas (municipal ward wise) are identified through site visit which has been cross checked with disaster management authority using google earth; (ii) to ascertain the causes of vulnerability where academic and officials were interviewed using descriptive questions and a qualitative survey was also used for interviewing stakeholders through scalable questionnaire; (iii) to suggest disaster prevention measures for securing the study area from respective vulnerabilities following the guiding principle of Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction 2015-2030 and suggesting the enactment and enforcement of different acts which inter alia include Guwahati water bodies (preservation and conservation) Act, Building Byelaws Meghalaya, the Forest Act and the Environmental Protection Act.