Road Dust Control

Posts Tagged ‘sediment deposition’

The mighty Brahmaputra has wiped out nearly 4,000 square kilometres of area at a rate of 80 square kilometres per year, destroying more than 2500 villages and affecting more than five million people in Assam.

Assam’s Water Resources Department has identified 25 vulnerable and very severe erosion-prone sites and estimated that the Assam valley portion of the Brahmaputra has lost approximately 7.4 per cent of its land area due to river bank erosion and channel migration.

Experts from Assam and the USA, who have formed a joint committee, christened ‘The Committee for Developing Mitigation Strategies for Brahmaputra River Basin Flood and Erosion Problem’, have come forward with a set of short and long term measures to address the problem and develop cost-effective solutions.

The experts have pointed out that the key factors in causing the river extremely unstable at many reaches are ‘aggradation’ (raising of the river bed due to sediment deposition), intense ‘braiding’ and large water discharge.

They pointed out that till now both short and long term measures to tackle the erosion problem had been done only on a piecemeal basis during emergency situations depending on availability of funds.

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