Austria, Jan Patrick R.

22, 2015

The Koshi
Barrage
Failure

June

The Koshi River is the largest branch of the Ganga River, flowing
through Tibet, Nepal and India. It is a 729-km river, originating from the
highest glaciers of Mount Everest, travelling through Bihar the Northern
most state of India and ending at the convergence of Gangas. It may be the
only river which changes its course at approximately 120 km in the last 250
years. It was known during the earlier days as The Sorrow of Bihar due to
flooding in the monsoon and drought in the winter.
However, it became the Pride of India when the Koshi Barrage was
finished. The said dam was built from 1959 to 1963 on the Nepal side for
purposes of flood control, hydropower generation and irrigation. It has 45
spurs which are 500 m from each other on the eastern embankments in
Nepal. It has a capacity of 950 000 cusecs in a peak flood. Unfortunately, the
12-km to 16-km embankment has also served as a silt trap, elevating the
bed of the river higher than the surrounding alluvial plane.
Unfortunately, the river returned to being The Sorrow of Bihar due to
the tragedy that took place on August 18, 2008. It was near midnight of this
day when the Koshi River breached on the nose of spur 12.90 and 12.10 on
the eastern embankment, 12 km north of the barrage. It only took minutes
for 14 districts in Bihar, India and five village development communities of
Nepal to be overwhelmed by the severe flooding. The flood caused
tremendous loss of human life and property, affecting 3.5 million people. In
the earlier days of the tragedy, displaced persons were pushed to drink
unsafe water from the flood which ended to deaths due to cholera and other
water borne diseases. Many people suffered eye disorders while children
developed pneumonia. Billions of worth of property was spoiled. Most
temporary homes were washed away by the flood along with their domestic
animals. The disaster also disconnected the fundamental East-West highway,
cutting off the connection between the farmers of rice and vegetables to
their buyers. Even underground optic fibers were destroyed, causing
intermittent telecommunications.

Figure 1: The Koshi River

Pinpointing the reason of the breakdown of the barrage was as hard as
rising up again from the disaster that it gave. Doing so became even
especially harder when India and Nepal began blaming each other for the
tragedy. On the first hand, Nepal concluded that the devastation of the river
was due to the carelessness of the Indian government. On the other hand,
India blamed Nepal by stating that they were not able to conduct their work
due to the insecurity brought about by eastern regional transport strikes.
Despite the disputes and arguments from both sides, researchers came
up to the conclusion that the flood was not a natural phenomenon caused by
heavy precipitation. It was the result of a massive built up of silt, a part of
the heavy sediment load carried by the Koshi River down from the
Himalayas. All river banks experience erosion, but the amount of silt being
eroded is dependent on the location of the bank. As for the Koshi River, it
experienced lots of erosion, resulting for the river bed to become even higher
than the alluvial plane, as aforementioned. Geotechnical failure usually
occurs due to stresses on the bank exceeding the forces that it can
accommodate. Changes in the valley floor slope can influence alluvial rivers.
This may cause river bank failure, resulting in hazards to people living near
the river and to structures such as bridges, pipelines, and powerline
crossings. While large and fast flowing rivers should maintain their original
flow paths, low gradients make effects caused by slope changes larger. Bank
failure due to this may also lead to avulsion, in which a river abandons its
own river channel in favor of forming a new one, as what happened to Koshi.

What happened to Koshi is much worse than what has been said in this
paper.
For
example:

Figure 2: Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao

Above is a school sitting hazardously on the edge of the Ganga,
vulnerable to river erosion. Beyond this school was once a road, mango
orchards and other forms of livelihoods. The flood caused by the Koshi
Barrage failure caused the soil to erode severely, resulting to structures
being washed out. The ones not wiped out by the flood are now like this
school pictured above dangerous to be used due to the weak soil that is
being used as its foundation.
As of the writing of this paper, the hazardous lives of people near the
Koshi River continue. India and Nepal have still been pointing their fingers at
each other as to who is in charge of repairing what has been destroyed. The
once-called Pride of India has even gotten a worse name compared to The
Sorrow of Bihar; since 2008, it has been called No Mans Land.
Reaction:
The destruction of the Koshi River Barrage was undeniably triggered by
factors of politics and human error. However, people cannot turn a blind eye

or two that there was also some geotechnical factor in the failure of the dam
or barrage.
India and Nepal spent billions for the construction of the said dam but
silt only overpowered what the engineers planned and constructed. Up until
the writing of the paper, most engineering schemes to reconstruct the dam
are still not deemed very plausible. It is a challenge to the engineers how to
control the changing course of the river and the rising river bed at the same
time, not to mention all the other structures which have had their
geotechnical features weakened due to the soil erosion caused by the flood.
The failure of the Koshi River Barrage, despite the casualties that it
gave the Nepalese and Indonesian people, is a very interesting matter to civil
engineers and civil engineering students alike. As a student, I would love to
keep myself updated and witness the progress the international professionals
will make in the future not just because I am taking Geotechnical Engineering
as a subject right now, but also because my course and everything that
revolves around it interest me a lot.
References:
The Koshi Deluge: A History of Disaster for Nepal. (2008, September 12)
Retrieved from http://blog.com.np/2008/09/12/the-koshi-deluge-a-history-ofdisaster-for-nepal/
Engineering disasters: Reporting from along Asias shared rivers. (2015,
February 6) Retrieved from http://www.thethirdpole.net/engineeringdisasters-reporting-from-along-asias-shared-rivers/