Kurigram flood survivors battle a second catastrophe

Here's the thing about the floods in Kurigram: the water going down isn't actually good news – it just means the next disaster is starting.

Once the rivers drop below danger level, the ground itself starts giving out. Soaked through for days, the banks along the Brahmaputra, Teesta and Dudhkumar simply collapse — and homes that made it through the flood go under a week later anyway.

Ask anyone living on the chars or the low floodplains and they'll tell you the pattern by hear: the floods come first, then the land disappears out from under you.

Momena Begum is 70. She's stopped counting her age in years — she counts it in how many times she's had to pack up and move. Twenty-five times she and her 80-year-old husband Abdul Jabbar have rebuilt their house on the Brahmaputra's edge. Twenty-five times, the river has come back and taken it. They're in the Bisharpura shelter now, and even that's starting to look shaky.

"My land stretched as far as the eye could see," she said, standing outside the shelter. "Now I own nothing. There was a time my husband didn't even need to work — the land gave us enough. These days we go hungry some days. This char is probably where I'll die."

Down the way, Nazrul Islam has been through this 18 times. Four of those were in just the last six months. People here don't really treat losing a house as an emergency anymore — it's more like something you plan around. Build it knowing you'll probably have to tear it down. Plant knowing the crop might not make it to harvest.

More than 300 kilometres with nothing protecting them

Part of why this keeps happening is just geography. Sixteen rivers cut through Kurigram, and between them they've got something like 374 kilometres of riverbank. Only about 66 of those kilometres have any real protection — concrete, permanent structures. Everything else, about more than 300 kilometres, is just exposed.

And this year it was proved again. In Ramhari Mouza, under Bidyananda Union in Rajarhat, the Teesta started eating into homes almost the moment the floodwater pulled back. An autorickshaw driver and two farming families watched parts of their houses get swept away. More than 50 other households are sitting right on the edge, waiting. The BWDB had put down thousands of geo bags there just weeks before — they didn't hold.

"The river first took the trees, then the farmland, then the geo bags," farmer Ataul Haque said. He watched it start one morning, out of nowhere. "I've already shifted one house. Two more are still standing on the edge."

Majnu Sarkar, a day labourer, has lost count somewhere around five or six times by now. "I don't know where we'll go now," he said. That was pretty much all he had to say about it.

When the embankment itself gives way

It's not just individual houses, either. Over in Nageshwari, a stretch of embankment along the Dudhkumar River finally buckled — days of rain plus water pressure from upstream did what erosion had already been working on for a while. Around 20 villages in Bamandanga Union went under. Thousands of people were left stranded, watching helpless as water poured into homes, roads, fields.

Local Union Parishad representatives say nearly 20 villages across four wards were swallowed once that embankment failed, and a lot of families ended up scrambling for higher ground. The water's dropping again now, but people who live nearby say the broken section is still just sitting there — one more heavy rain and it could happen all over again.

Farmers are getting hit twice

For farmers, it's a one-two punch. First the flood drowns the fields. Then, once the water pulls back, the riverbank itself gives out and takes whatever crops actually survived the flooding.

Officials put the flooded cropland in Kurigram Sadar, Nageshwari, Bhurungamari and Roumari at around 204 hectares so far — Aman rice seedbeds, jute, vegetable plots, nurseries, all of it. And that's on top of hundreds more hectares lost elsewhere in the district. Chilli, eggplant, cucumber, pointed gourd — gone. A lot of Aman seedbeds washed out before they were even old enough to transplant. Some farmers watched their jute fields go straight into the river, and now they're stuck with loans against land that isn't there anymore.

Plenty of families are looking at months with no harvest income at all, while also trying to figure out how to rebuild a house.

Buying land you know won't last

With solid ground running out, people have started doing something that sounds almost desperate when you say it out loud: buying rights to char land that everyone involved knows could vanish. These are informal deals, and they end automatically the second the river takes the plot.

Faruk Mia put in Tk3 lakh — everything his family had — for one bigha of exactly this kind of land. No compensation clause, nothing. "If the Brahmaputra takes this land tomorrow," he said quietly, "my money goes with it."

At this point, land along the river isn't really something you own long-term. It's more of a bet you're making against a river that doesn't lose.

The rivers right now

Per the latest BWDB readings, the Dudhkumar was sitting 23 centimetres above danger level at Pateshwari. The Dharla, Brahmaputra and Teesta are all still below their danger marks. But forecasters are warning that more heavy rain over the Brahmaputra basin could push things back up fast in low areas of Rangpur Division — Kurigram, Nilphamari, Lalmonirhat included.

People here are watching that forecast nervously. Any rise in the water and the erosion that's already chewing through weakened banks could speed right up.

What officials are saying

Kurigram's Deputy Commissioner, Annapurna Debnath, said the district has put together Tk 200,000 in emergency cash and handed out 1,100 packets of dry food to families in the low-lying areas. She said each of the nine upazilas also has 1,000 geo bags on hand, ready to go wherever erosion gets bad.

But she didn't pretend it was enough. "The allocation currently available cannot fully meet the needs across all nine upazilas," she said — adding that the district has already put out everything it has and is now asking for more.

BWDB's Rakibul Hasan, an executive engineer in Kurigram, said emergency repair work on the broken section of the Dudhkumar embankment would start right away, and that engineers are keeping an eye on the vulnerable stretches around the clock, checking hotspots and prepping for whatever comes next.

For families like Momena's, though, help tends to show up after the fact. By the time the geo bags actually reach the collapsing bank, people here say, the land — and everything built on it — is usually already gone.