Chapter 3: Learning from Ladakh

A chance meeting (10^th August)

The SEEDS team found us in the Choglumsar rubble just after they landed from Delhi. They have come to Leh to help develop a post disaster shelter rehabilitation strategy. A few weeks earlier Rupert and I had attended a two week Architecture Sans Frontieres / SEEDS workshop in Uttarakhand on disaster mitigation and response. Our new skills were about to be put to use much sooner than any of us had imagined.

In the field (11^th August)

We depart with the SEEDS team on a two day field visit to Saspol village, where we can start our investigations without disturbing immediate relief efforts. The team will document reasons for building failure and study and the local domestic architecture. The team also includes a freelance photographer who will reveal the impact of the disaster to the wider world.

Constructing emergency bridges on the road to Kargil

On the way we find the Indian army in large numbers, building emergency bridges and clearing the road, restoring connections with the rest of India. Helicopters fill the skies lifting the injured to safety and dropping much needed supplies. We soon have to abandon our jeep when we come to a destroyed bridge, and from here the army transfers us by army truck between river crossings. An hour’s drive takes nearly four.

The SEEDS team catching a lift in an army truck

My family and friends in the UK are worried: have I considered the risk of disease, do I have enough drinking water, will there be more torrential rain? That night I dream that I am drowning, and then that I am searching for bodies underneath the water. I wake up several times in a cold sweat.

Traditional buildings (12^th August)

SEEDS take a holistic approach to shelter rehabilitation, bringing together an understanding of safety, comfort, environmental sustainability and local socio-cultural factors. Past disasters show that shelter rehabilitation schemes which haven’t addressed these factors have been left unoccupied, or have disrupted social interactions and activity patterns and harmed communities.

A traditional Ladakhi house

Traditional houses in Ladakh have evolved over centuries to suit the local environment, culture and lifestyles. A thorough understanding of the traditional house is going to be a key starting point to a successful shelter initiative.

We identify a suitable case study house in the village, and I set to work on drawing plans, sections and elevations. Together with an interpreter, we uncover from the owner the activity patterns and reasons for spatial arrangements and other design features. We find, for example, that an east facing entrance is considered auspicious. 

Sketching in a traditional Ladakhi house

Shelter Strategy (13^th-14^th August)

Back in Leh, Mihir (the SEEDS structural engineer) and I spend the day writing up a report on our findings and thinking about a possible shelter proposal for inclusion in the SEEDS shelter strategy report. We work by torch and candle light late into the night, and then over the weekend.

Most of the SEEDS team return to Delhi to continue their work from the SEEDS office. They ask me to stay on as an intern to work on the shelter design and construction in the field in Ladakh. I change the date of my return flight to the UK so that I can stay until September 20^th.

People around me are falling ill with stomach complaints; two of my friends have to go to hospital, one on her arrival back in the UK, the other here in Leh. All have been working in the mud.

Photos: Sebastiaan de Groot

Chapter 2: Unrecognisable Leh

Our return  (8th August)

It was impossible to prepare ourselves for what we would find in Leh. We were met with stories of dead bodies, people screaming, flattened buildings, and panicked running to find high ground in the middle of the night.

Devastation in Leh

An exhausted and tearful friend had been terrified that we weren’t going to return from our trek. In the UK, my family had started a desperate search for me on the internet and reported my disappearance to the British Embassy.

Leh, Ladakh’s only big town, was a different place now: covered with plees for volunteers, shops closed, long queues for food and money, phone lines and power supply gone. Disaster had struck and backpackers wandered the streets in disbelief, helplessly searching for bottled drinking water and missing friends.

Relief work and the horrors of Choglamsar (9th & 10th August)

 

The morning after our return to Leh, we enlisted to help with the relief work, joining teams of backpackers and locals working tirelessly to clear the town’s hospital of mud. As we shovelled out buckets full of sludge, we uncovered x-ray machines, scanners, and other medical instruments.

The following day we were sent to Choglamsar, where the devastation was on an unimaginable scale. Whole stretches of the village had simply vanished, the remainder had been mangled under the immense force of a tide of mud and rock. Cars had been tossed around like toys.

In disbelief at Choglumsar

The human side of the disaster was even more harrowing. Teams of sniffer dogs clustered together in the rubble while lines of soldiers passed by with blanket covered stretchers. The stench of rotting food (and flesh?) made it necessary to wear masks.

News Reports

A woman trying to dig in the mud with her hands was inconsolable. A pile of rubble, fallen telephone wires, and a crushed car, had only a few days earlier been her shop. We worked to clear the house of a widow and her children, and the restaurant of a frail old man. Their stories were miracles of survival.

As we walked back through the streets we were overwhelmed with smiles and offers of thanks. Despite the magnitude of the disaster, the wonderfully warm and kind nature of the Ladakhi people remains strong.

Photos: Katherine Johnson

Chapter 1: Nature’s Fury

The Storm that changed Ladakh (6th August)

Terrifying thunder and lightening awoke us in the early hours of August 6th, four days into our trek through the Markha Valley. As we tried to shelter in a tent unequipped for such a ravaging, we had little idea of the destruction the storm was visiting on the valley behind us, and the wider region of Ladakh.

An isolated high altitude desert, Ladakh is normally shielded from the Indian monsoons by the world’s highest mountains to the south. Rain is very rare. But nature had already changed its course on our trek. Successive days of torrential rains brought bruising river crossings, tales of drowned horses, and a night cut off and sleeping in the open without a tent or food. The violence of this new storm would ensure we were about to encounter even greater dangers before we could return from our trek.

First News (6th August)

We awoke early the next morning, and started the climb to the campsite at the top of the valley. There, guides and porters crowded around a radio, and amongst the crackle, were able to decipher fragments from the BBC news: mudslides and flash floods had caused devastation, hundreds of people were feared dead, thousands missing.

Panic came over the camp. To leave the valley through the canyon would now be extremely dangerous, but the way back down through the valley was totally destroyed. “You will come with me tomorrow,” an anxious guide told us “do not attempt to enter the canyon alone.”

After the Storm: Camping at the top of the Markha Valley

Escape attempt (7th August)

 
The rain continued throughout the night, and by morning the campsite resembled a swamp rather than a high altitude desert. Several guides decided it would be too dangerous to leave that day.

But when the rain stopped, our new guide made a move. Seven of us started the steady climb over the 5230m pass as fast as the thin air would allow us. The guide was visibly agitated by our progress and constantly warned, “Water levels will be rising, hurry, HURRY.”

Brush with Death (7th August)

At the entrance to the canyon we found that landslides had destroyed much of the path. The only way down was to criss cross the river, now a raging torrent of water broken in several places by waterfalls. Each time we crossed we held hands in an attempt to reduce the danger of being swept away amongst the rocks and mud. The canyon was narrow and the guide warned us to keep looking behind for fear of surging water.

After 5 or 6 crossings, we came to a further narrowing in the canyon. Over the roaring sound of the water, I could hear rocks grinding together on the river bed. We formed a chain and started the crossing, the water was waist deep.

Just as Laura approached the river’s edge, the force of the water swept off her feet. As she went, I too was pulled over and lost my grip of her hand. Now on my back in the middle of the river, Aleks’s hand was all I had left. But the force of the water was too strong and my grip was going. I could hear myself screaming. I was going to die.

Then I felt Oliver dragging me out by my backpack. Others had grabbed Laura from the bank. At the river’s edge, I started to hyperventilate. The shock had been too much. Confronted by nature’s power, I was now very aware of my own mortality. I couldn’t contemplate going on, but couldn’t imagine going back through the river. I was trapped.

After regaining my breathing, and with a now sodden and very heavy backpack, we started to climb a near vertical landslide. Rocks and sand came away as we climbed, I made sure I didn’t look down. At the level of the path, we contemplated if it would be possible to rejoin the path over a 5m wide gap where it had slipped away. It would be a challenge even for experienced climbers with ropes. The only other option was a 7 hour climb back over the pass, exhausted, shivering, and in rising water levels.

Second attempt (8th August)

We turned back.

It was a challenge, physically and emotionally, to make it. I struggled to control recurring bouts of hyperventilation. When we reached at the top of the canyon we met other trekkers who had just come over the pass. They kindly offered to share out what tents and food they had to set up camp together here and wait. My cousin and I slept in a kitchen tent together with cooks, porters and pony men. As we sat together in the candlelight, one of these porters told us with a mixture of disbelief and sadness, that his house at the other end of the Markha Valley had been swept away.

The following morning I awoke with a sense of dread. But this time all trekkers and guides set off to the canyon together and water levels were significantly lower. In places, diversion of the stream was possible with rocks so that waterfalls could be descended with ropes. Despite around 30 river crossings, we were able to make it down through the canyon.

Success in lower water levels

Hugging with relief at the bottom of the canyon

The road to Leh (8th August)

The road out had been washed away so we walked a further 3 hours to an army base. There, almost every civilian vehicle was stranded – petrol had run dry after the road links with the rest of India had been destroyed – and for a while it seemed as though it would be impossible to return to Leh. When we eventually found a lift in the back of a truck, we sat in stunned silence as we drove. Village after village was buried deep in mud.

We now know that villagers and trekkers lost their lives in the Markha Valley, others had to be airlifted out.

Photos: Laura Boardman, Jozef Stafiej, Katherine Johnson