Floods in Ladakh

In the night of 5th-6th August heavy floods and mood avalanches hit Leh and neighborhood villages cousins the death of around 400 local people and several tourists. One part of the city was completely washed away.

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That night there were very heavy rainfalls. It usually does not rain in this region, that night the monsoon manage to get over High Himalayas and withing one hour there was more rain.... than the half YEARLY rainfall in this region. The soil is not used to absorb those amounts of water, so there were massive land slides and mood-stone avalanches in the region. Whole province was disconnected from the world. The huge mood-stone avalanche destroyed the airport and nine bridges were broken off on the only two roads leading from the region (in direction of Kashmir and in direction of Manali). It took five days for army to clean up the airport and then most of the tourist flew away as fast as possible. It took around two weeks to repair the first road connection to Kashmir and the road to Manali is still not repaired.


Many, many local houses were destroyed during the floods. People here are building mostly from the "mood bricks". Since it is never raining in this region and this is the cheapest available building material. The problem is that in case of heavy rainfalls those houses are simply dissolving.

Now I am helping to remove mood and stones from some local people houses in the village Saboo (few kilometers from Leh). This is very physical work.
It is very difficult to update blog from Leh right now, so I will update it about the trekking when I leave Ladakh.