Hyderabad: Even as the Forest officials and climate scientists are baffled at the ‘localised phenomenon’ that has caused the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees in the Eturunagaram wildlife sanctuary lying between Mulugu and Tadvai mandals, experts are coming up with certain possibilities that could have led to the extreme weather event.
Though it is believed that a squall or a gale during the thunderstorms could have caused the destruction, scientists are drawing parallels with what happened in Wayanad.
According to climate consultant Dr N Sai Bhaskar Reddy, there could be multiple aspects that could have caused the event including the soil lithology, the force and direction of the wind, and more factors.
“There could be a weak zone of soil in that area. Sometimes the water entering the soil into the bedrock could act as a lubricant, causing the soil to move altogether, like it happened during Wayanad landslides,” he observes.
“As trees themselves act as windbreaks, the alignment of the road that passes through the forest could have also been a cause, in addition to the age of the trees which got uprooted,” he notes.
According to the Telangana Forest officials, the winds blew diagonally from above with a strong force, which apparently not measured.
According to climate expert Dr Donthi Narasimha Reddy, the winds could have blown at 80 to 90 km per hour, and when the cool air from the top mingles with the hot air from the below, the winds come down with a greater force, causing such destruction.
He told Siasat.com that such squalls are common in West Bengal and Odisha, but for the first time a similar phenomenon was observed in Telangana.
Comparing it with the wind turbulence in airplanes, he pointed out one such incident that happened on May 21 this year in Singapore airlines, where a passenger died and several passengers were injured, when wind turbulence hit that flight.
Most of the uprooted trees were native species that were planted by the forest department, and were young. The extreme weather event occurred within a 3 km area.
Women and child welfare minister Dannasari Anasuya has sought a central team to visit the forest to ascertain the cause of such devastation in a confined area, and has instructed the forest officials to take steps to protect the trees that could still be saved.
District forest officer Rahul Jawed and his team of forest officials have been using satellite data, and the data available with the National Remote Sensing Center’s (NRSC) and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) to study the extreme weather event.
