Chittagong fears final jolt

Road renovation work is going on at a snail's pace, resulting in unbearable traffic congestion on Arakan Sarak (Chittagong-Cox's Bazar road) in the city. Photo: Star Photo

In a word, the people here are living dangerously under death sentence, awaiting their link with life to be severed by one final jolt. Then everything will be plain dead.

The other day The Daily Star published a seismographic map of the inner plates of the earth in which the location of Chittagong showed itself to be at the centre of the zone, which receives the most vibrations. Is Chittagong then to be sacrificed to the bowel movements of the earth?

Of all natural calamities, earthquake is the most unpredictable. There is, arguably, no knowing a second earlier that it will occur. Therefore, it owes nothing to human responsibility. Precautionary measures may be taken, but of what help they would be nobody knows.

But the environmental scientists will disagree with the above view. They rightly think that the occurrence of an earth-tremor may not be foretold, but it is partly man-made, and proper nature and urban planning can lessen the extent of damage. And, that is true.

The earth inside is somewhat similar to the human belly. There are constant motions and counter motions going on in the stomach in order to adjust itself to the pressure that the digestive system is subjecting it to. Our mother earth is also patiently tolerating the thousands of acts of digging, boring, piling, dynamiting, embanking, and under-grounding on the surface of the earth and in the sea. All these human acts create strain, stress, tension and anxieties on her, and she moves a plate there, or turns on her side, or just does something to relieve herself a bit. Her slightest movement may spell disaster for her children, particularly of Chittagong.

So what the humans should do is to create lesser and lesser pressure on the mother earth. In my layman's view the reason why Chittagong is vulnerable to a greater frequency of earthquake can be attributed to the installing of the hydroelectric project in the hills at Kaptai.

The Kaptai Dam was built about 40 years ago for storing of water of the River Karnaphuli in order to produce electric power by the pressure of water. It has done, I believe, a fundamental damage to the ecological balance in this part of the world. The hills are holding up a huge mass of water on a very fragile foundation, the nearest analogy of which can be a tender-aged child carrying a heavy pitcher on its shoulder with water full to the brim. The child may collapse under the pressure, and so can the Kaptai Dam.

Modern engineering disapproves of turning a river's direction by building bank on it. Besides, after 40 years of exhaustive use, the Kaptai project has developed inefficiency, and its output is now much below a desired rate. There are other power producing plants in the country doing a better job.

Given the political turmoil that the Kaptai Dam has given birth to, I think, it is now time we dismantled the dam, gradually, phase by phase, and let Karnaphuli flow in its own original style, the water-level come down in the Rangamati Lake, and the hill people live ever happily after; and Chittagong to remain tremor-free.