Retracing Realistic Disaster Scenarios from Archival Sources: A Key Tool for Disaster Risk Reduction

Abstract

Disaster scenarios are constructed by integrating natural hazard phenomena and social science sources of information. We profiled 51 natural hazard events of nineteenth century Kashmir that provide insights into the impacts of varying degree of severity that spread through the socioeconomic and political systems, influenced adaptation, and increased the consequences of the resulting disasters. The root cause of these disasters was embedded in the social, natural, and political economic systems of their time, where vulnerabilities overlapped and interacted periodically with successive colonial regimes and acted as tipping points. The combined effect of successive colonial regimes, inept administration, rigid political economy, and natural hazards made the situation go from bad to worse and reduced Kashmir to the depths of distress and subjugation. Over the arc of the nineteenth century, a series of disasters led the Kashmiri population to learn how to live with disasters and minimize risk, bringing about the evolution of social and environmental knowledge. Understanding the natural hazard vulnerability of the Kashmir Valley through archival narratives can help in scenario building to translate findings into formats that reduce related risk now as it did then. The resulting information can be useful for regional design, planning, and policy responses to promote disaster risk reduction.

Developing a Hazard Profile of The Kashmir Valley Through Historical Data Analysis For The Period 1900-2020

“…The structure of the Valley, hydrographic features and drainage characteristics of its river systems viz., bowl shape (elongated trough), variation in altitudes with consequent reduced lag time and sudden peak ows in rivers along low-lying areas during heavy rainfalls make the region speci cally prone to oods and congenial for inundation . Pertinently, most of the population and socio-economic activity is hosted by the area prone to oods and is one of the major urban centres of the region, Srinagar, where the number of wetlands that act as natural sponges, have come down severely, resulting in frequent ooding (Gupta, Consequently, the Valley was affected in a very passive way, exhausting the stores and destroying the assets of the dwelling population (Ahmad et al, 2021) in the past century, through impacts like deaths and injuries (1950,1957,1959,1973,1992,2014,2015), long periods of inundation (1957,1996,2014), marooned settlements and entire villages (1973), partial or total damage to infrastructure and washing away of structures (1912,1928,1950,1959,2014), devastating crops and agricultural sector (1903,1909,1928,1959), loss of domestic animals and cattle (1928,2015), causing health (1900) and food insecurities (1957), and damage and loss of government records (1905).…”

“…Hazard Identi cation and disaster pro ling is an essential element and the rst step of the entire process of evaluating risks (i.e., risk assessment) and of disaster management (Weston, 2004(Weston, , 2013. Developing disaster scenarios through historical perspective represents a valid back analysis tool that offers useful insights to understand the occurrence and impacts of natural disasters, establish existing and potential hazards, the conditions within which a given hazard takes place, determine the degree of vulnerability and the capabilities of response of the society subjected to that hazard (Jahn and Wehling 1998; Ahmad et al, 2021). It is typically contextual to 'forensic investigation of disasters' to indicate the root causes and risk drivers (Burton, 2010;IRDR, 2015); or like the 'science of past disasters' (Riede, 2014); or similar to 'charting a historical trajectory of disasters' (Bankoff, 2007;Ahmad et al, 2021).…”

“…From the historical perspective Kashmir Valley has been vulnerable to multiple natural disasters and intermittently subjected to their consequent impacts which can be established from its rich archival data sources (Kelman et al, 2018;Ahmad, 2021). Historical events data have been utilized to study the patterns of seismicity and trends of earthquake occurrences in the Kashmir region (Ghaffar and Abbas, 2010;Anees and Bhat, 2016) and to illustrate hotspots for seismic activity (Sharma, Kumar and Ghangas, 2013).…”

“…Reconstruction of chronology of oods in Kashmir Valley by employing historical hydrology has been attempted to overcome the de ciency of su cient time-series database for better ood hazard assessment . Historical natural hazards were pro led by Ahmad (2021) to have better insight into what vulnerable populations were subjected to under severe natural and deprived socio-economic conditions in Nineteenth Century Kashmir. An intersection of vulnerability to environmental hazards and to socio-political con ict to provide an overview of the disaster diplomacy of Jammu and Kashmir throughout history was studied by Kelman (2018) by compiling events of both environmental hazards and sociopolitical violence.…”

“…The valley of Kashmir is subjected to several natural hazards for example, earthquakes, oods, landslides, snow avalanches, droughts, wild res, extreme temperatures, lightning and thunderstorms, snowstorms, hailstorms, etc., (SDMP, 2017; Patel et al, 2020). Henceforth, a case study on the recent past emphasizes the need to know how the valley of Kashmir has been impacted by natural hazards and disasters during the entire Twentieth Century and early Twenty-rst Century through historical review and to stress its utility in disaster preparedness (Reide, 2014(Reide, , 2017Ahmad, 2021). Therefore, the present study attempts to develop a hazard and disaster pro le of the Kashmir Valley focusing on the four most prominent natural hazards viz., earthquakes, oods, landslides, and snow avalanches.…”