DEHRADUN: The year 2016 is proving to be a terrible year for Uttarakhand in terms of human lives lost in natural disaster incidents. As per official figures, 62 people have been killed in natural disasters like flash floods, cloudbursts, landslides and forest fires as of Monday. Over 64 persons have been injured.

Even animals have had to bear the brunt of nature's fury with around 887 animals including domestic cattle perishing in disasters since January this year. Besides loss of human lives, there has been considerable property loss as well with around 144 houses getting completely damaged and 133 sustaining severe damage in natural disaster incidents.

Elaborating on the reasons behind the high numbers, Santosh Badoni, deputy secretary, disaster management department, told TOI, "Uttarakhand is sensitive to natural calamities due to its terrain. Besides flash floods and landslides which take maximum lives in a year, the state is also one of the most seismic or earthquake-prone regions in the country with majority of its area lying in either the highly vulnerable Zone 5 or Zone 4."

This year, Pithoragarh has been the worst affected disaster-hit district in the state with 17 causalities and eight people missing and feared dead in the series of cloudbursts which ocurred on July 1, triggering flash flood and landslides and wreaking havoc in the Bastadi, Naulanda, Charma and Pathorkot villages of the district.

Even Dehradun district reported 13 deaths due to natural disaster in the present year with as many as 10 workers being killed in a single incident when they were hit by a landslide in the Chakrata area in the month of May. Eight people lost their lives in Tehri district followed by Chamoli district where five persons have been killed this year.

Around 87 drinking water pipelines and 1184 electricity lines were also damaged during the natural disasters in Uttarakhand between January and July.

Data from the disaster management department shows that on an average 73 people have lost their lives every year in the state since 2001, mainly due to landslides and flash flood-related incidents. The average death count excludes fatalities during the 2013 catastrophe which alone killed over 4,000 people.

Overall, since its inception, the state has seen 1,016 people getting killed (excluding the 2013 disaster) in landslides and flash floods. In the last two years, landslides and flash floods have claimed 119 lives.

And if the modelling is correct, this earthquake could be at least as devastating as the 2011 quake which devastated Japan and took 16,000 lives.

The discovery of the hidden geographic fault lurking under southern Asia could unleash a magnitude 9.0 quake, placing up to 140 million people at risk in the most densely-populated place on earth, researchers fear.

The study of the area took more than a decade and detected the massive fault beneath Bangladesh, parts of India and Myanmar.

The research, the first to use GPS data collected from Bangladeshi tracking stations, suggests the northeastern corner of the Indian subcontinent is on a collision course with Asia.

The tectonic plates far beneath the earth’s surface are covered in layers of sediment more than 20m thick, and the study models suggest at the upper levels they are stuck in a pile-up, one thrusting under the other in a ‘megathrust’ which may have been under stress for more than 400 years.

Potential quake zone. Solid red line indicates an area of about 62,000 square kilometres that could move during a subduction-zone earthquake, affecting 140 million people or more. Image: Chris Small/Lamont-Doherty Earth ObservatorySource:Supplied

Researchers believe the area is spring-loaded to buckle and rupture under the strain. But because their discovery is relatively recent, they have no idea when, or if, the fault will give way and trigger a 8.2 to 9.0 megaquake.

“We don’t know if it’s tomorrow or if it’s not going to be for another 500 years,” study co-author Michael Steckler, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York City said in an article on the university website.

“We don’t know how long it will take to build up steam, because we don’t know how long it was since the last one. But we can definitely see it building.”

Overcrowding would make it difficult to rescue survivors in the event of an earthquake.

“Right now, the streets are clogged with traffic such that it’s impossible to drive around Dhaka on a normal day,” Steckler said. “If you fill the streets with debris, it’s really going to be impossible to get supplies and rescue equipment and things like that around,” Steckler told Live Science.

The research team is now building a more detailed map of the shape of the fault, as well as looking at historical tsunami data to understand how often megathrust earthquakes occur, Steckler said.

Japan tsunami hits Sendai

The March 11, 2011 Japan earthquake, with a magnitude of 9.0 struck off Japan’s northeastern shore and was the most powerful to ever hit the island country.

The quake triggered a devastating tsunami which struck the area with waves of up to 40m, tearing apart villages and towns, flattening homes and carrying ships inland, before sucking back to out to sea carrying debris, vehicles and bodies in its wake.

Damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant completed a deadly treble of disaster, contaminating an area which continues to see more than 100,000 displaced locals living as evacuees.