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The death and destruction left behind by the flash floods in the Kheer Ganga river in Dharali resurrects painful memories the 2013 Kedarnath disaster.
Over the past 12 years, a series of disasters have underscored the fragility of the Himalayan terrain.
On August 18, 2019, a cloudburst in Tikochi and Makudi villages in Uttarkashi's Arakot region triggered flash floods and landslides, killing at least 19 people and affecting 38 villages.
In February 2021, the collapse of a hanging glacier caused a debris flow in the Ronti Gad stream, a tributary of Rishiganga, sweeping away two hydropower projects in Chamoli. Eighty bodies were recovered, and 204 people went missing.
In August the next year, flash floods caused by a cloudburst in the Maldevta-Song-Baldi river system washed away large parts of the Maldevta town near Dehradun, affecting a 15 km stretch.
The Dharali disaster, experts say, shares features with the 2021 Chamoli tragedy.
A study published last month in the Journal of the Geological Society of India has confirmed a sharp rise in extreme rainfall and surface runoff events in Uttarakhand after 2010.
The research, led by HNB Garhwal University Professor Y P Sundriyal, shows that while 1998-2009 saw warming and low rainfall, the trend reversed post-2010, with central and western Uttarakhand witnessing more extreme precipitation events.
"Data from 1970 to 2021 shows a clear increase in extreme rainfall events after 2010," Sundriyal.
The state's geology compounds its risk.
Steep slopes, young and fragile formations prone to erosion and tectonic faults such as the Main Central Thrust make the terrain unstable. The orographic effect of the Himalayas forces moist air upwards, leading to intense localised rainfall, while unstable slopes magnify the risk of landslides and flash floods.
A November 2023 study published in the Natural Hazards journal, analysing disaster data between 2020 and 2023, recorded 183 incidents in Uttarakhand during the monsoon months alone. Landslides accounted for 34.4 per cent of these, flash floods 26.5 per cent and cloudbursts 14 per cent.
The Centre for Science and Environment's Atlas on Weather Disasters shows that between January 2022 and March 2025, the 13 Himalayan states and Union territories reported extreme weather events on 822 days, claiming 2,863 lives.
Experts say these natural factors are worsened by human activity. Unregulated road-building, deforestation and construction of tourism infrastructure and settlements on unstable slopes or riverbanks have increased disaster risk.
The threats are not limited to extreme rainfall and landslides. Climate change is rapidly transforming the region's glaciers, creating new hazards in the form of swelling glacial lakes.
Uttarakhand has more than 1,260 glacial lakes, with 13 identified by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) as high risk and five as extremely dangerous. These lakes pose major downstream threats, especially as warming accelerates glacial melt.
NDMA's 2020 guidelines on Glacial Lake Outburst Floods called for mapping high-risk lakes, enforcing land-use restrictions and using remote monitoring to track potential breaches.
Despite multiple expert reports, policy and enforcement have failed to match the scale of the threat.
As Uttarakhand reels from yet another disaster, the question remains whether the warnings from scientists will finally be heeded before another tragedy strikes.
