15. Gujrat Riots
Madina Nagar
• Inter & Intra City
Polarisation
(Planned & Unplanned)
– Ghettoisation
– New Slum developments
– Economic Imbalance
– New Threats: social &
economical
18. • Occupational rehabilitation
– 33 of the 50 planned work-sheds for gas victims started. All except one was closed down
by 1992.
– 1986, the MP government invested in the Special Industrial Area Bhopal. 152 of the
planned 200 work-sheds were built. In 2000, 16 were partially functioning.
– It is estimated that 50,000 persons need alternative jobs, and that less than 100 gas
victims have found regular employment under the government's scheme.
• Habitation rehabilitation
– 2,486 flats in two- and four-story buildings were constructed in the "Widows colony"
outside Bhopal.
– The water did not reach the upper floors.
– It was not possible to keep cattle.
– Infrastructure like buses, schools, etc. were missing for at least a decade.
19. • Environmental rehabilitation
– The area around the plant was used as a dumping area for hazardous chemicals.
– Water bodies in the vicinity were contaminated and so were the fishes.
– Increased loading on treated drinking water supply, met by the govt.
• Economic rehabilitation
– Effects of interim relief were more children sent to school, more money spent on
treatment, more money spent on food, improvement of housing conditions.
21. Suffering Wildlife
• A mud-covered snake slithers through a channel in a lake bed at
Indiana's Wabashiki Fish and Wildlife Area. The now-exposed
channel once provided access to a beaver lodge but has dried
during harsh conditions that have placed most of the state in severe
to extreme drought status and threatened crops across the
Midwest.
• Droughts may become more common, climatologists say, but
humans aren't powerless against them.
• "The silver lining in this is that we haven't come close to pulling out
all the stops on things like irrigation efficiency, where and how we
grow certain types of crops efficiently, and urban conservation—like
not watering green lawns in the desert when people are struggling
to produce crops," Postel said. "There is a lot that can be done to
get more value for each drop of water and I think creative solutions
are going to become very important."
23. Fish Out of Water
Photograph by Jeanette Warner
24. Fish Out of Water
• A fish out of water surveys the scene at old Bluffton, a
Texas town that was flooded in 1937-38 during the creation
of Lake Buchanan. As lakes across the Lone Star State have
shrunk in the current drought, they've left some wildlife
high
and
dry
but
also
revealed
ruins, gravestones, fossils, ancient tools, and other artifacts.
• Though many of these relics were submerged by 20thcentury dams, some ancient artifacts date to a time when
Southwest droughts were far more common, Postel said.
• "If you go way back you find these mega droughts that are
believed to have undone civilizations like those in Chaco
Canyon and Mesa Verde," she said. "It's in our history to
have much more serious drought than we've had in the last
century."
26. Thinned Herds
• Drought conditions on America's southern plains have been hard on
donkeys, like these once abandoned animals now under care in
Athens, Louisiana. Many Texas and Louisiana grazers, faced with
dried-up lands, have been forced to sell off their cattle and abandon
the donkeys that once helped to tend those animals but have
become too expensive to keep.
• Droughts can devastate agriculture of all types and spawn famine
with horrific consequences. An estimated 40 million people died
during the 20th century's drought-induced famines, and the 21st
century's toll could be higher.
• "Droughts are cyclical," Postel said. "You can't pin any one thing
that's happening right now on a larger phenomenon of global
climate change but all the science is saying that what we're seeing
now is what's expected more often in a warming world. It behooves
us, I think, to plan on what's likely coming down the pike."
28. Wildfires
•
•
•
Nebraska National Guard aviators use a "Bambi Bucket" to dump water on the
raging flames of the High Park fire west of Fort Collins, Colorado. The blaze was
ignited by a lightning strike on June 9, the kind of natural occurrence that is more
frequent during drought conditions.
By the time the fire was fully contained on June 30, it had destroyed more than
250 homes and torched nearly 90,000 acres (364 square kilometers). The High
Park fire was the most destructive in Colorado history—but only for a few weeks.
Before its flames were completely extinguished, the Waldo Canyon blaze broke
out, killing two people, burning some 350 homes, and adding the most destructive
chapter yet to a historically bad fire season.
And more water-related problems may be yet to come in the wake of such fires.
"The fires complicate things in terms of water quality," Postel explained. "With
rains the sediments and debris run off burned-out watersheds, causing floods and
impacting water quality or clogging treatment systems. This happened last year in
New Mexico with the Las Conchas blaze and its one-two punch of fire and
flooding."
30. Shrinking Lakes
• A shrunken Lake Powell shows the impacts of drought and illustrates the
consequences of human thirst on the Colorado River, which has been
dammed and diverted so much that it now runs dry long before reaching
its estuary at the Sea of Cortez.
• About 30 million people, some as far away as Los Angeles, depend on the
Colorado for drinking water. The river also nourishes a major agricultural
breadbasket. Water shortages in the basin aren't just a future worry—
they're part of the present.
• "We're in a depletion situation in the Colorado River Basin, and not just
during a drought year," Postel said. "The average ten-year demand is now
higher than the average ten-year supply so we're using more water than
the river usually has in it basin-wide."
• Ninety years ago the Colorado River Compact divided water use among
seven states. But demand has soared since then, and the river doesn't
hold as much water as planners once thought. "In 1922, the year the
compact was signed, it was the end of a pretty wet period," Postel said.
"We're not likely to see that again any time soon for any length of time."
32. Dry Dock
• A once-floating dock was left high and dry by drought conditions that
lowered the level of Medina Lake some 52 feet (16 meters). The
lake, which provides water to Texas farmers and the city of San Antonio, is
shrunken thanks to an ongoing drought that includes the driest, hottest 12
months in Texas' recorded history.
• Across much of the western United States, similar conditions have caused
cities, farms, and businesses to fear for the future of their water supply as
demand outstrips availability.
• "In the Southwest, if you look at the past three-quarters of a century when
people were moving here and farming here and building dams here, all
that activity was based on a much wetter period of time than we've had
historically or what we're likely to have in the future," said Sandra
Postel, founder of the Global Water Policy Project and the National
Geographic Society's Freshwater Fellow.
• Overall, nearly half the country currently faces drought, according to the
U.S. Drought Monitor.
