What Dharali & Chasoti disasters have in common

CHASOTI/DEHRADUN: Within nine days, two Himalayan villages separated by hundreds of kilometres but bound by similar economies and geographies were torn apart by sudden floods. Dharali in Uttarkashi was hit on Aug 5, and Chasoti in J&K’s Kishtwar followed on Aug 14. Both live off pilgrim traffic and the rhythms of apple and walnut orchards. Both saw their temples, bridges and farmland vanish in minutes. Both were said to have been hit by cloudbursts, a familiar shorthand in the mountains. Yet meteorological records tell a different story -- the rain that fell in those hours was too little, too scattered, to have unleashed such destruction. And in neither village was there any weather monitoring system that might have clarified the sequence of events.

The contradiction has led scientists to suggest another possibility -- that these were glacial lake outburst floods , or GLOFs , disasters triggered when melting glaciers or fragile moraine dams gave way. The question matters. If rainfall was not the culprit, then the risks faced by mountain communities are even more unpredictable than assumed.

At noon on Aug 14 in Chasoti, Suresh Chander, 49, was at his dhaba near the stream when the sound came. “On the night of Aug 13, there was no heavy rain. Even the next day, only a thin drizzle, the kind that barely makes you wet. I was at my dhaba when the water came down and we just ran,” he said. “My family survived, but my uncle Dina Nath, 75, a priest at one of the three temples, was taken. Three temples were gone in minutes. I grow apples, but what kept us going was the yatra season.”

IMD gauges near Dharali logged only low totals on Aug 5, even as floods struck and left one killed and at least 68 feared dead, forcing a halt in the Gangotri yatra. In Chasoti, the district recorded almost no rain on Aug 14, with duty officers reporting only intermittent drizzle at best. Yet torrents of water, rocks and mud swept down the valleys, destroying homes and orchards. The official toll here reached 70 on Thursday, with an equal number missing. CM Omar Abdullah has said it is “nearly impossible” they would be found alive.

Mukhtar Ahmed, director of the meteorological centre in Srinagar, told TOI that satellite and radar data confirmed rainfall activity over Chasoti and indicated the catchment’s linkage with Ladakh’s Zanskar valley, which houses several glaciers. However, he admitted that the recorded rainfall alone was too low to account for the scale of flooding.

“The nearest weather station at Gulabgarh — just 2–3 km aerially from the site—recorded only 4–5 mm of light rain on Aug 14. Such limited rainfall cannot generate a flash flood of this magnitude. It suggests something occurred in the upper catchment, possibly intense localised rainfall in several adjoining valleys, which then funneled down through a single narrow catchment valley,” Ahmed added.

He also drew more parallels between Chasoti and the recent Dharali disaster . “Both areas have glaciers in their upper catchments, and in both cases, the flash floods carried down unusually large boulders of extraordinary size,” he added. Chasoti lies in Paddar valley, which borders Zanskar to the north and east. From the village, it takes a multi-day, high-altitude trek across Umasi La, at 5,300 metres, to reach Padum, the main town of Zanskar.

Anand Sharma, president of the Indian Meteorological Society and former additional director general of IMD, echoed similar concerns, noting that the available rainfall data does not support the cloudburst theory. Instead, he stressed the need for improved data collection from upper catchment zones to better understand what triggered incidents like Chasoti and Dharali.

“Rain-bearing clouds are typically large-scale systems. To attribute such devastation to a tiny, hyper-localised cloudburst does not align with meteorological science,” Sharma said. He added that rainfall must be examined across entire catchments, alongside closer monitoring of glaciers and unstable slopes, to accurately assess such disasters.

The official reliance on “cloudburst” as a blanket explanation, researchers warn, risks obscuring the complexity of Himalayan disasters. Doppler radars may track extreme rainfall, but they cannot anticipate a glacial dam breach or a slope collapse. India’s National Disaster Management Authority has already identified dozens of potentially dangerous glacial lakes in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and J&K. Monitoring remains limited, and warnings rarely reach communities living directly in harm’s way.

Amid these debates, infrastructure projects in both areas are inching forward. The govt has proposed a strategic Paddar–Zanskar road to link Jammu with Ladakh. Plans include a 45 km road via Chasoti–Machail–Soomchan–Zongkhulm. A 31- km stretch from Paddar to Lossani Machail has already been sanctioned under PMGSY, along with a proposed 8-km tunnel through the mountains to Dangail.

For survivors in both Dharali and Chasoti, though, scientific debates and infrastructure promises feel distant, even as they struggle to come to terms with the recent tragedy, and brace themselves for the future, in case another one strikes.