Glad you caught on to the main idea A.
See I am not nearly as radical as people like to paint me as . I do believe in
being rational :-).
BTW, there is a whole lot more to this scheme than meets the eye. I will expose
more of it shortly. Stay tuned.
c-da
On Nov 3, 2012, at 10:33 AM, Alpana B. Sarangapani
absarangap...@hotmail.com wrote:
That is a great detailed description, C-da. Thank you!
And it does look scary. How can a natural process be totally stopped and all
the waters be stored into those dams It will be like cleaning the Augean
Stables.
Also, even if it is done, if/when the embankments give way then the water
will be uncontrollable. This would be worse than the Riverlinking idea. I
don't see a solution there now. : (
On Nov 2, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Chan Mahanta cmaha...@gmail.com wrote:
A:
It is NOT so much about building dams as embankments. The idea proposed by
Major Chandra is entirely based on building
hundreds of miles of mega-embankments, on both sides of the Brahmaputra. He
would create monster canals, impoundments, he calls Sagars,
both sides of the Brahmaputra, ostensibly to prevent the tributaries from
flooding the main river and its flood plains, which really is most of the
Brahmaputra valley. His embankments are proposed to be 20 meters ( 66 ft) in
height.
If we draw a cross section of a 66' tall embankment with a 20 meter ( again
66') top, it will be like a mesa that is 66' wide at the top and 330 ft.
wide ( 110 yds)
at the base at the very least ( with a 1:2 slope, which is much too
steep-ideally it should be 1:3). These will run from the western to the
eastern end of the Brahmaputra valley, two of them to the north and two to
the south. I call them the Mother of All Embankments.
Now compare these embankments to the new highway that has been under
construction four at least the past 5 years, from near Jagiroad to near
Na-Gaon. I am not sure if it is done, YET! Did you see the environmental
catastrophe this project created? And it was barely 3 meters tall and
perhaps no more than 15 meters wide at the top. The Chandra Sagar project
will be a hundred folds larger, if not more. Oh, one more thing: Chandra
knows he will have to build an impervious core to these embankments.
Impervious core will be concrete. I am no civil engineer, but an educated
guess will be that this impervious core, 66' tall will be at least 10'
thick. Can you imagine the volume of concrete he will need to build these -
nearly 500 mile long for each embankment, multiplied by two for the north
and an equally long , nearly a thousand miles, for the south AT THE VERY
LEAST. I say at the very least, because we have not considered the lengths
of these embankments both sides of the tributaries also that the scheme will
require as well.
All these are in the realm of the possible. But at a cost. And what might
the costs be?
A: First we should look at WHY the Brahmaputra and the tributaries flood so
much. A very short and simple answer is that the rivers have become very
shallow
from silting. So to be able to carry they volume of water they need to
expand, widen, causing flooding. The PRIMARY cause of the worsening flooding
is SILTING of the rivers.
So, why are these rivers getting silted? Where is the silt coming from? A
simple answer is that it comers from Arunachal to the north and from the
other hIll areas from the south.
WHY you may ask. Again to put it simply, because of unrelenting
deforestation and land disturbance ( earthmoving) in these hilly areas. The
population there are building roads, settlements, farming more and so forth.
Now then, what do you think will Chandra's embankment building do to the
silting problem of these rivers? Simply put, it will exacerbate the silting
problem by several hundred folds, not to mention the dust and other
pollution that will be the norm all over Assam for decades to come.
Not that Chandra does not know of the silting problem. He does. And he tells
us that the tributaries will have to be fitted with dams to prevent the
silt from getting into the
Brahmaputra and that they will have to be DREDGED!
Wait just a minute! Dredging did he say? I heard it is NOT possible.
Apparently Indian and Kharkhowa experts have decided that dredging is not
feasible since there is no place to deposit the dredged silt. I am sure you
heard it too, right here in Assamnet.
WHAT GIVES? Does it NOT sound fishy to you? IF Chandra Sagars are contingent
on de-silting of the tributaries, why not start doing that to the MOTHER
river, the Brahmaputra, to begin with? That will obviate the need for
building the Chandra Sagars with the mother-of all embankments, which will
uproot thousands of natives from the valley and render vast areas of fertile
arable land permanently inundated and keep it under water year round.
But
