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Journalism of Courage
Guwahati, Jan 31: While the below 8 magnitude of the Gujarat earthquake was severe enoug to cause devastation beyond human imagination, the Great Indian Earthquake of 1897, which rocked Assam and India’s North-East, was almost 30 times more powerful and ranks as the world’s biggest recorded tremor till date.
This has been confirmed by Dr Jugal Kalita, a professor at the Colorado University, who has done a study on earthquakes that Assam region has experienced during the past two centuries. “The earthquake Assam experienced on June 12, 1897, had measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, and ranks as the biggest tremor recorded in recent history,” Kalita, an Assamese settled in the US, has said in a recent article published in Prantik, a leading Assamese fortnightly published from Guwahati.
Quoting The Historical Seismograms And Earthquakes Of The World edited by W.H.K. Lee, M. Mayers and N. Shimajaki, Kalita has said that the second most intense tremor recorded in the recent times had occurred in the Philippines (8.7) on September 21, 1897, three months after the Assam earthquake.
“The surface of the ground vibrated visibly in every direction as if it was made of soft jelly, and long cracks appeared along the road.” That was how Richard D. Oldham, the pioneer of systemic seismic studies, has been quoted describing the 1897 earthquake.
Oldham, the then superintendent of Geological Survey of India, also observed in his famous Report on the Great Earthquake of 1897 that the magnitude of the earthquake was such that within two and a half minutes, an area of 1,50,000 square miles was reduced to ruins.
“In Shillong, the capital, the prime tremor lasted for about two and a half minutes. There was a massive sound, and survivors said it was as if the engines of a thousand ships caught in a rough sea were roaring at the same time,” The London Times, in a report on August 10, 1897, said.
The total number of deaths was initially estimated as 6000, but only 1542 deaths were confirmed later. Fortunately, the population of Assam was pretty less in those days. Besides, there was no high-rise concrete buildings like we have today.
Kalita, in his article, has extensively quoted contemporary newspaper reports to illustrate the impact of the quake. A letter written by one Rev G.M. Davis of Shillong, published on August 10, 1897 in The London Times, said that the main Shillong church was reduced to a dump of stones within less than one minute’s time. The waters of the Brahmaputra rose in waves as high as ten feet and swept away houses as if those were made of cards, wrote the then Goalpara Civil Surgeon M.E. Dobson. While the entire water reserve of a lake was thrown out by the quake, an entire hill came off and fell on the road cutting off links to Goalpara town, Dobson wrote in his official report to the government.
The 1897 earthquake was followed by another major one on August 15,1950, that had not only made the Upper Assam town of Sadiya disappear completely into the Brahmaputra, but had changed the very course and character of the mighty Red River. The 1950 quake had left more than 1550 dead.
