No One Had a Tongue to Speak

The Untold Story of One of History's Deadliest Floods

Utpal Sandesara, Tom Wooten

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781616144326
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

On August 11, 1979, after a week of extraordinary monsoon rains in the Indian state of Gujarat, the two mile-long Machhu Dam-II disintegrated. The waters released from the dam's massive reservoir rushed through the heavily populated downstream area, devastating the industrial city of Morbi and its surrounding agricultural villages. As the torrent's thirty-foot-tall leading edge cut its way through the Machhu River valley, massive bridges gave way, factories crumbled, and thousands of houses collapsed. While no firm figure has ever been set on the disaster's final death count, estimates in the flood's wake ran as high as 25,000. Despite the enormous scale of the devastation, few people today have ever heard of this terrible event. This book tells, for the first time, the suspenseful and multifaceted story of the Machhu dam disaster. Based on over 130 interviews and extensive archival research, the authors recount the disaster and its aftermath in vivid firsthand detail. The book presents important findings culled from formerly classified government documents that reveal the long-hidden failures that culminated in one of the deadliest floods in history. The authors follow characters whose lives were interrupted and forever altered by the flood; provide vivid first-hand descriptions of the disaster and its aftermath; and shed light on the never-completed judicial investigation into the dam's collapse.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Praise Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Major Characters
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• A Note to the Reader
• Prologue: “A Vaniyan of Morbi Goes to the Machhu's Waters”
• Chapter 1: On the Banks of the Machhu River
• Chapter 2: “The Government Decides, and the Government Builds”
• Chapter 3: “This Monsoon Descends”
• Chapter 4: “Something out of the Ordinary”
• Chapter 5: “Not a Single Brick will Survive”
• Chapter 6: “Even the Pests were Dead”
• Chapter 7: “They would Work and Cry, Cry and Work”
• Chapter 8: “Everyone was a Beggar”
• Chapter 9: “But Courage and Strength Remain”
• Chapter 10: “Justice was not Done”
• Epilogue: “Can Any Page of History be Forgotten?”
• Resources
• Index
• Back Cover