Death in India's "Paris"

"Wherever you put your foot in the mud that is now Morvi, you strike a body." So said Pankaj Zaveri, a survivor of the most disastrous accident ever to befall India. In the midafternoon of a torrentially rainy Saturday, the 197-ft.-high earthen Machhu dam in western India's Gujarat state suddenly burst open. The waters behind it boiled six miles down a river in the state's Saurashtra district and crashed into Morvi, a semi-industrial town of 75,000, known as "the Paris of Saurashtra" because of its many green parks and broad avenues. Mud houses were entirely swept away, brick and concrete buildings were smashed, and just about everything else was buried under a layer of ooze almost 4 ft. thick. Rescue workers found bloated bodies half buried in the sediment and hanging from fences and tree branches. By week's end, some 1,100 corpses had been counted, and it seemed probable that the final toll would go even higher, not counting those killed in the 30-odd small villages between Morvi and the dam.

The seven-year-old Machhu dam had been designed to cope with an average annual rainfall of 22 in. The storm that precipitated the collapse dumped 28 in. of rain on the region in less than 24 hours. Water was already lapping over the top of the dam when engineers rushed to try to open the sluice gates. But some of the gates stuck, for reasons still unexplained, and thus India's "Paris" was doomed.

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