<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/assam-india-stilt-houses-flood-resilient-makeover/>
"Umananda Pathuri keeps a watchful eye on his eight-year-old daughter while his
wife naps with their toddler. Outside their house in Nikori, a village in one
of northeast India’s most flood-prone districts in the state of Assam, flood
waters are rising and the rains are incessant. “We’re the Mising, Assam’s river
people, so of course the child can swim,” says the 42-year-old. “We’re used to
floods. But they now seem unpredictable, more treacherous somehow.”
Pathuri and his family live in a low-lying area near the Dhansiri river, a
tributary of the Brahmaputra, where floods are an annual feature. He is one of
a handful of remaining masons in the village who build raised bamboo houses,
known locally as
chang ghars. With walls made of porous grass mats and stilts
that protect the house when the river overflows its banks, these lightweight
structures are perfectly designed for this disaster-prone region, as became
acutely apparent in 2017 when a flood destroyed over 4,000 houses and damaged
over 100,000. The few homes that remained relatively unscathed in the
flood-affected areas were traditional
chang ghars.
For centuries
chang ghars have offered a low tech and low cost solution to
flood-resilient housing in the region. Indeed, such homes are common across the
world’s low-lying areas that are located near water. Amazonian communities in
Brazil build houses that float, or are on stilts, to stay dry during the annual
flood. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, the height of the stilts under traditional
bamboo and wood houses, or
nhà sàn, is determined by previous flooding peaks.
Yet in the last decade, the flooding pattern in Assam, once so familiar to
Pathuri’s tribe, has changed. Floods are more frequent, more erratic and more
prolonged than before, and the outcome has been a growing urgency for the
chang ghars to adapt to meet the contemporary challenges putting the Mising’s
lives and livelihoods at risk.
Every year, different areas get flooded and the river does not recede as easily
as it used to,” says Pathuri, adding that Nikori and neighboring villages now
often remain waterlogged from the end of June sometimes all the way to October.
“The bamboo stilts and mud foundations of our traditional
chang ghars were
designed to cope with floods that lasted a short time, not this kind of
prolonged water-logging.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
