New Delhi: As Kerala puts itself on the path to rebuild itself from the ruins of devastating floods, NASA published an image with the details of massive destruction by floods on the state’s geography. The marks of destruction by the deadly floods will take more than a season to get to the normal condition. The images by NASA show the great difference between before the state’s destruction by the floods and after the deadly disaster.
The left image was shot by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 on February 6, 2018, before the flood. And the right image was shot by the Multispectral Instrument on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite on August 22, 2018, at a time when flood water had covered the area. The images make flood water to appear dark blue as they are of false-color. Vegetation area is depicted in bright green.
Apart from that, NASA also released an image depicting the total rainfall on the country and commented over the floods of Kerala that August rain especially played a part in massive flooding of the state, despite the fact that it was worsened when water was released from some of the dams. The authorities did a mistake by releasing water from all the 80 open dams in the region instead of releasing water gradually. The dams that were opened, included Idukki Dam which is considered as one of the largest dams in the Asian continent. Among all, thirty-five dams were such that it was opened for the first time.
“The dam releases came way too late, and it coincided with the heavy rain that was occurring,” said Sujay Kumar, research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Due to the tragedy, people are in despair due to the fact that the tragedy has left more than 400 people dead and at least a million homeless. And as of now, people are living in shelters of relief camps.
Low-lying areas are still submerged in water including the houses in it, roads are blocked due to the water logging and the sewage has washed into the channels that are in fact very slow to get effectively flushed out.
There was financial aid offers from many foreign countries but was rejected by the central government of India. But despite that, the central government had spent a meager 600 crore as an immediate relief fund.
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