Planning for Mitigating Flash Flood Events a Case of Almora District in Uttarakhand

Abstract

Flash flood is an annual occurrence in Uttarakhand especially during the Monsoon season. Over the recent years, the amount of rainfall in this region has risen, thereby posing even greater threats and challenges. Almora, one of its 13 districts, experienced one of the most damaging flash-floods during the 2010 Monsoon season. Thus, there is an urgent need to strategize the flash flood protection and mitigation measures. Implementing the flood protection steps often involves very long planning horizons of 30 years or more, because each phase is time-consuming to implement or entail significant investment, or both. The flash flood issue can be addressed by diverting more attention on high-threat areas that can be identified spatially through thematic layer preparation and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis based on parameters that directly influence it further combining them using flood risk index to generate flood risk zones. Successively, responsive guidelines and standards at every scale of planning hierarchy, from macro to micro level, are proposed to reduce the impact during a disaster and minimize those events. Certain guidelines are developed for high alert zones giving them more emphasis, as they hold maximum chances of future occurrence of a disaster event. ¹