At around 9.30 am on Sunday, Godambari Singh was working with her mother-in-law in their fields in Reni village, on the banks of the Rishiganga river in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. They heard a sudden noise, like an explosion. Godambari would later say she thought the sky had split into two.
Looking up, Godambari saw the river rushing towards her, bringing stones and rocks along with it. Even as she stood there, her mother-in-law was swept away.
What Godambari had witnessed was the massive flooding that devastated Chamoli on Sunday, February 7. According to reports, it was caused by a piece of the Nanda Devi glacier falling into the Alaknanda river in Tapovan area and bursting through the Rishiganga dam.
Thirty two people are confirmed to have died so far, and about 200 are missing.
In their home in Reni, Godambari and her husband, Prem Singh, are struggling to come to terms with their loss. They’ve been inundated by visitors: neighbours offering condolences and media personnel asking Godambari to narrate what happened.
“The whole village was covered in a cloud of dust,” Prem told Newslaundry. “The river was roaring, the earth was shaking. The windows of our house were rattling. We’ve never seen anything like that in our lives.”
There are dozens of villages like Reni in the area, situated in the valley near the river and adjoining mountains. Sunday’s catastrophe has left the residents of these villages terrified; many no longer want to live there.
Reni village is where the Chipko movement started in the 1970s. Reni resident Gaura Devi was a prominent Chipko activist who united women to stand against the felling of trees. Gaura Devi’s son, Chandra Singh, said that after Sunday, villagers have been abandoning their homes at night to sleep in temporary tents pitched in the hills above.