Farmer Prasanta Bhoi was getting ready for dinner when he heard a loud sound. It was that of water moving, and growing louder. “It became a roar, like that of a massive wave. Before I could react, I was swept off my feet by water that rose up to my chest,” says Bhoi. The Kushabhadra, a sub-distributary of the Mahanadi, had breached an embankment at Kusupur village in Puri. Within minutes, all the furniture in Bhoi’s house was swept away as he and his family rushed to the roof of their pucca house. And within days, thousands of villages and scores of towns were flooded as the river and its branches overflowed in 19 districts, affecting 34 lakh people. Days later, a second flood struck. On September 23, it was the Baitarani, Brahmani and Subarnarekha riversystems that overflowed, affecting another 25 lakh in 10 districts. Among these districts were some that had been hit by the first wave too. The 59 lakh affected by “the worst flood” in recent memory represent a seventh of the population of a state that had been praying for rain not long ago. On September 3, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had declared the state was facing drought-like conditions in 17 of its 30 districts. First wave By September 8, the Hirakud reservoir, which dams the Mahanadi in Sambalpur, had stocked up more than 626 ft of water, just 4 ft under the maximum. “Since the monsoon weakens in September, we tend to fill up at least 75 per cent of the reservoir by then,” said an engineer. That day, a low-pressure formation over the Bay of Bengal caused rain over Chhattisgarh, from where the Mahanadi originates, and where nearly 67,000 sq km of Mahanadi’s 77,794-sq-km catchment area falls. The rainfall that day was 485 mm in Kelo area of Chhatisgarh’s Raigarh district, and 244 mm in Korba district. The Hirakud reservoir can hold up to 3.9 million acre feet at a time, but it rained 12.3 million acre feet between September 2 and 15 in the Mahanadi’s upper catchment in Chhattisgarh. And it was raining too heavily in the lower reaches too. In September, Orissa has received 386 mm rainfall; the normal is 201 mm. “In July and August it was almost dry but September has been full of rain,” says Sarat Chandra Sahu, director of the Bhubaneswar Meterological Office, calling it the “freakish behaviour of the monsoon”. “The total rainfall stays the same, but it comes in shorter, more intense bursts. Rivers just can’t cope with all that water in such a short time.” Even before the deluge from Chhattisgarh, Hirakud dam authorities had opened 53 sluice gates on September 6, correctly anticipating massive rainfall in the upper catchment area. After it did rain, they opened 59 sluice gates on September 9. “In the next couple of days, the entire volume of water at Mundali (where the Mahanadi branches off to coastal Orissa) was 13.64 lakh cusecs due to the opening of the floodgates. The Mahanadi is designed to handle up to 9 lakh cusecs. Anything over it causes a flood,” says Pradipta Mohapatra, special relief commissioner. This led to 82 breaches in the embankments of the Mahanadi and a flood that killed 41. Since then, 38 more have been killed in the second flood. Obstacles Just a couple of days before the flood, the government had transferred the special relief commissioner, the nodal officer in such situations, and the disaster arrived when the replacement was yet to settle in. Again, the Orissa State Disaster Management Authority has 205 motorised boats but only 250 people to rescue people. Just before the twin floods, 70 trained rescuers had been transferred out, which meant those remaining could use only half the boats. The government hurriedly got people deputed from the police, but they were ineffective in the absence of the mandatory two-month boat training. Timing, too, has made these floods more difficult to handle than those of 1982, 2001 and 2008. The full moon day on September 11 coincided with the passage of a high amount of floodwater through the Mahanadi. “Water could not be discharged through mouths and was pushed back to the villages. Even otherwise, the flat terrain in coastal Orissa hinders disposal of runoff water,” says Prabhat Mohapatra, undersecretary in the office of special relief commissioner. During the second flood, the new moon on September 27 posed a similar problem. “Water has not got discharged for days as the tides have kept pushing it back to the rivers.” Second wave The flood in the Baitarani and Brahmani riversystems has again been caused by unusual rains in the catchment areas. The rivers Sankh and Koel, which originate from Jharkhand, convege at Panposh near Rourkela to form the Brahmani, the largest river in Orissa after the Mahanadi. “It rained heavily in Jharkhand as well as Orissa, which led to the flood,” says water resources secretary Suresh Mohapatra. It rained 180 mm in Panposh in just 24 hours last week. The Baitarani, which flows from the hills of Mayurbhanj district, too was fed continuously. The government is still counting its losses. It has made a preliminary assessment at Rs 2,212 crore overall, but the actual damage due to the second flood is still being assessed by a Central team.