Tibet lake overflows but wall holds

Sarna said essential commodities have been stored by the state government at convenient places. An Indo-Tibetan Border Police post has been set up at the point where the Pareechu enters Indian territory, he said. The Army has also stationed collapsible rescue boats at Karcham, Pooh and Sumdoh, the nearest towns on the Indian side of the border.

At ground zero, however, they are still waiting. ‘‘I have died a thousand deaths waiting for the floods, why doesn’t it come and end this suspense?’’ hotelier Kirtan Chauhan sums up the plight of those living by the Sutlej in Himachal as he slumps into a chair.

For, they have been there, seen that—these 1,000 residents of Nogli who watched a 50-foot high wall of water from Tibet swallow 35 buildings four years ago, one of them Kirtan’s three-storey guesthouse. ‘‘My parents told me it was a once-in-a-lifetime disaster, their parents had seen one in 1901, and I would certainly never see one again.’’ So he began picking up the pieces, building a new guesthouse with the insurance sum and the Rs 60,000 compensation the state government paid. But barely had the frame come up when he heard about the Pareechu Lake in Tibet, and the impending deluge. Today the purple bags under his eyes say it all. ‘‘I wish I could run away,’’ he says.

There are many others in Nogli, who have been gripped by this fearful sense of deja vu for the last six days. They are all packed up and ready to leave. In 2000, the only warning they got was from Roop Singh Mata, the chowkidar of the high school nearby, who first heard the roaring waters and raised a cry. But this time they have been adequately warned by the administration.

Mangla Nand Sharma, a sweetshop owner, says he “will go mad with worry if I think of it’’. He could do nothing when his neighbour Mago Ram and his family members were swept away in 2000. Sutlej, the locals say, was quite a distance away until the fateful day when it changed its course and ate into their land. All in half an hour.

Sub Divisional Magistrate D.K. Rattan, however, is confident it won’t wreak as much havoc as it did last time for they are all prepared. ‘‘We’ll sound the siren the moment we learn the Pareechu has burst,’’ says the officer who believes the river will take five hours to reach Rampur Bushahr, the erstwhile princely state of Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh.

The administration has evacuated families in the ‘red zone’ (next to the Sutlej) and has housed them in a government building. ‘‘We have sounded a warning in 20 villages in the sub-division,’’ he says. But some like the four Kaushik brothers at Mayapuri village in Sainj will stay. Meena, Nehru Lal, Kaushik’s wife, says: ‘‘We are a big joint family, we wouldn’t feel comfortable anywhere else so we decided to stay put. The siren will warn us when the flood comes.”

(With agencies)