The earthquake was not unexpected, but it could have been far worse. It was a rehearsal for the really big ones to come.
There are two things we can now say about the deadly earthquake that struck Central Nepal on 25 April leading to tragic loss of life and property: a) It was not a surprise, and b) It could have been far worse. Himalayan seismologists agree that the quakes did not sufficiently release seismic energy beneath us, and that this earthquake should spur us to be better prepared for the really big ones to come.
Kunda Dixit
Relief work is going on, supplies haven’t reached many remote settlements and hospitals are still having to cope with the backlog of wounded. So, it may still be a bit premature to analyse the response to the disaster by the state, the international community, non-governmental groups and individuals to this disaster. Even so, some lessons could also have a bearing on ongoing relief and help streamline it before the rains arrive mid-month.
For about 10 years before the earthquake, scientists and international agencies had beenwarning the Nepal government to step up preparedness, set up a Disaster Management Authority, start retrofitting schools and hospitals. Alarm bells were ringing about just how unprepared we were to a disaster that everyone knew was coming. During the 1996-2006 conflict, Nepalis had to deal with the day-to-day disaster of war, and earthquakes were not a priority. Since 2006, the constitution, peace process and power games have preoccupied politicians and the media, leaving them too distracted to plan for a future quake.
Even so, the awareness campaign was starting to have an effect. Funds were being pledged, exercises held, contingency plans drawn up, communities had started stockpiling emergency equipment and pre-positioning supplies. We were preparing to be prepared when the earthquake struck on 25 April.
There were many factors that kept the death toll far lower than expected. First of all, at M7.8 this wasn’t a ‘Big One’ and it didn’t strike at night when most people would have been home. The intensity and duration of shaking was just below the threshold for ferro-cement failure, so brick and clay mortar buildings went down and only badly-built concrete structures collapsed. Also, the dry season and over-extraction of groundwater had lowered Kathmandu’s water table which meant that the Valley’s soft soil did not suffer liquefaction.
Striking just before noon on a Saturday saved at least 75,000 lives – of children who would have been in the 5,500 schools that were completely destroyed. Many of their parents were in the fields, digging potatoes, harvesting wheat or weeding the cornfields. A quarter of the men in the 15 districts have migrated out, which also lowered the death toll.
Kathmandu itself was spared the worst-case scenario for a projected M8.5. Telecommunications could have gone down, but didn’t. The airport should have been knocked out, but reopened in a few hours. Highways linking Kathmandu to the plains were not blocked, bridges did not go down.
Electricity was restored to most of the capital in a few days. Retrofitted schools in the Valley and the outskirts all survived. Hospital buildings did not collapse, and triage training drills had prepared medical staff, and the system worked. Journalists who had attended disaster management workshops reported responsibly. The state media performed exceptionally well in keeping the flow of accurate information, and community FM stations went back on airalmost immediately after the first shock, transmitting from improvised outdoor studios.
Experts we spoke to while researching this piece, however, said there are many things that could have been done better during the ‘Golden Hour’ when more lives could have been saved. The first few days saw slow government response, confusion and lack of coordination. The National Emergency Operation Centre should have been activated immediately with participation of top political leaders, security agencies, scientists as well as the United Nations Resident Coordinator. Customs was a disaster, operating with obdurate business-as-usual red tape when relief material needed urgent delivery.
This group could have taken snap decisions on assessment, deployment of search and rescue, relief and coordinating incoming assistance. As it turned out, the politicians vanished, and the Nepal Army stepped in to play the coordinating role. The other lesson is to immediately expand and train the Armed Police and Nepal Army’s Collapse Structure Search and Rescue teams and equip them properly, so they can respond even faster to save more lives, and be more cost-effective than international rescuers.
The April quake and aftershocks in May only partially released the energy stored under Kathmandu, and the rupture fizzled out south of the Valley. There is still a potential for another quake in Central Nepal, and then there is the ominous ‘seismic gap’ in western Nepal that hasn’t seen a mega-quake in 800 years. Both will be even more disastrous than what we have just been through, with the city’s reinforced concrete structures not able to withstand the shaking.
What we have seen was just a warning to be better prepared, a rehearsal for even bigger quakes to come.
KATHMANDU, MAY 23 – High winds and thundershowers on Saturday evening added to the hardships of people taking refuge in tents in open spaces after the April 25 earthquake displaced them.
Heavy storms accompanied by brief rainfall hit the Capital and the surrounding districts, killing at least one person and affecting thousands living in makeshift shelters.
Dust storms covered many places in the Capital starting at 5pm. Thousands living in open spaces in Kathmandu and its outskirts were affected by the sudden storm and rain. The wind blew away hundreds of tents and the brief downpours made the belongings wet.
“Scores of tent-houses were blown by the storm and the rainfall dampened our clothes. We have no blanket dry to use,” said Sita Manandhar, who has been staying under a tent in Basantapur area since the earthquake destroyed her house.
A sudden change in local weather conditions brought brief rains accompanied by winds of 78 km per hour speed in the Valley. The impact was felt for about 45 minutes before the gusts moved to eastern districts. Thunderclouds travelled from Dhading and are now moving towards the East, said Barun Poudel, a meteorologist at the Meteorological Forecasting Division (MFD).
Kumar Shahi of Dallu said many people reset their tents for shelter after the rain stopped. “The storm blew some 15 tent-houses here. Many people could not even keep their bed sheets dry. Everyone is now picking pieces as we have nowhere to go,” Shahi, who has been taking shelter at Ram Ghat, said over the phone.
The storm and rains also affected the people taking shelter in Tundikhel and other grounds in the Valley. “It affected children and the elderly. People are wearing wet clothes. It’s going to be a hard night for them,” said Saroj Bajracharya, from Tundikhel.
Police said at least one person was reported dead. According to Nepal Police spokesman DIG Kamal Singh Bom, the victim was identified as Laxmi Kumari Dahal, 32, who was riding pillion on the bike driven by her husband when a tree branch crushed her. “She died in Janamaitri Hospital during treatment. Her husband is reportedly fine,” said Bom.
A taxi was damaged in the Pashupatinath area but no injuries were reported. “Many people in Kathmandu and outside were affected after the storm damaged their makeshift shelters. But, we have not yet got reports from the outside of serious losses,” Bom told the Post.
Home Ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal said they had not received reports of any serious damage. According to the Met Office, rains were recorded in Taplejung, Pokhara, Okhaldhunga and Kathmandu.
Temperatures especially in Tarai have shot up significantly in the recent days. Kathmandu on Saturday recorded day temperature at 33 degrees Celsius, the highest so far this year.
A displaced tries to save his tent from the storm in Tundikhel on Saturday evening. Photo by : Hemanta Shrestha
KATHMANDU, MAY 23 – High winds and thundershowers on Saturday evening added to the hardships of people taking refuge in tents in open spaces after the April 25 earthquake displaced them.
Heavy storms accompanied by brief rainfall hit the Capital and the surrounding districts, killing at least one person and affecting thousands living in makeshift shelters.
Dust storms covered many places in the Capital starting at 5pm. Thousands living in open spaces in Kathmandu and its outskirts were affected by the sudden storm and rain. The wind blew away hundreds of tents and the brief downpours made the belongings wet.
“Scores of tent-houses were blown by the storm and the rainfall dampened our clothes. We have no blanket dry to use,” said Sita Manandhar, who has been staying under a tent in Basantapur area since the earthquake destroyed her house.
A sudden change in local weather conditions brought brief rains accompanied by winds of 78 km per hour speed in the Valley. The impact was felt for about 45 minutes before the gusts moved to eastern districts. Thunderclouds travelled from Dhading and are now moving towards the East, said Barun Poudel, a meteorologist at the Meteorological Forecasting Division (MFD).
Kumar Shahi of Dallu said many people reset their tents for shelter after the rain stopped. “The storm blew some 15 tent-houses here. Many people could not even keep their bed sheets dry. Everyone is now picking pieces as we have nowhere to go,” Shahi, who has been taking shelter at Ram Ghat, said over the phone.
The storm and rains also affected the people taking shelter in Tundikhel and other grounds in the Valley. “It affected children and the elderly. People are wearing wet clothes. It’s going to be a hard night for them,” said Saroj Bajracharya, from Tundikhel.
Police said at least one person was reported dead. According to Nepal Police spokesman DIG Kamal Singh Bom, the victim was identified as Laxmi Kumari Dahal, 32, who was riding pillion on the bike driven by her husband when a tree branch crushed her. “She died in Janamaitri Hospital during treatment. Her husband is reportedly fine,” said Bom.
A taxi was damaged in the Pashupatinath area but no injuries were reported. “Many people in Kathmandu and outside were affected after the storm damaged their makeshift shelters. But, we have not yet got reports from the outside of serious losses,” Bom told the Post.
Home Ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal said they had not received reports of any serious damage. According to the Met Office, rains were recorded in Taplejung, Pokhara, Okhaldhunga and Kathmandu.
Temperatures especially in Tarai have shot up significantly in the recent days. Kathmandu on Saturday recorded day temperature at 33 degrees Celsius, the highest so far this year.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryDestroyed houses and new temporary structures in Dandagaun, Nepal. D. ShresthaThe village of Dandagaun is hard to reach on a good day. The access road starts at the Bhote Koshi River, a Class V waterway that drains Himalayan glaciers, then heads more or less straight up for 5,000 feet, past tiny villages and mountain streams. After 10 long miles it curves into a bowl that opens to the northeast. Here sit terraced fields of rice and corn cut into the hillside. Technically speaking, the village, in Nepal’s Sindhupalchowk district, lies in the Himalayan foothills. But these are foothills in the way that the sun is a medium-size star. The ridgeline above the village rises sharply for a quarter mile. Looking at it requires straining your neck directly up.
In the morning, when light first cuts through the gorge and fills the bowl, Dandagaun is the kind of place that could change an agnostic’s mind. To the south you can see the Bhote Koshi cutting its way through the deep gorge. To the northeast the Himalayas shine like so many white knives. Tibet is 20 miles away. For the mix of 1,400 or so Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians who live here, the presence of the divine is a tactile fact, visible each and every day. Of course there are gods. They live in the peaks just upriver.
Massive boulders ripped through town. An elderly man out cutting grass was beheaded. The survivors burned the dead.
Many observers of the April 25, 7.8-magnitude earthquake have noted the devastation’s sporadic nature: One Kathmandu neighborhood is fine, the next a scene from The Road. But there was nothing random about what happened at Dandagaun that Saturday. Open bowls beneath knife-edge ridges are bad places to be during earthquakes. First the mountain shook, destroying most of the village’s 180-odd stone and mud buildings. Then the ridgeline above simply fell apart, setting off the equivalent of a geologic mortar attack. A series of rockslides came off the mountainside, careering for about a quarter mile and gathering speed. Massive boulders ripped through town, crushing several houses. An elderly man out cutting grass was beheaded. When the geology had finished rearranging itself, 34 people perished and only a few buildings were left standing. The survivors burned the dead.
A couple of days later, when the hillsides were still shivering with aftershocks, Dipak Deuja, a charismatic, handsome 24-year-old from Dandagaun, started the long walk home. He’d been in Kathmandu at the time of the quake, and when he finally arrived at the village he found his immediate family and his bride of six weeks, Shunita, spared.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryDipak Deuja (center), with his wife Shunita (right) and mother in a temporary shelter in Dandagaun, following the earthquake. D. Shrestha
But 10 relatives, including an uncle, some nephews, and his brother’s wife, had been killed. Soon his cousin Sandesh Deuja, a 23-year-old truck driver with a somber glare and a crisp fauxhawk, arrived. He too had been working out of town at the time of the quake, and he too found his family spared but his house wrecked. Both men helped build temporary shelters from wood and corrugated metal for their families not more than 50 feet from the sites of their destroyed homes. Then they tended to the urgent matter of finding food. In rural Nepal, villagers cache harvested crops in their homes. Those were now a rubble. Sandesh and Dipak, like everyone else, dug out what rice and corn they could find and stored it in the school, which at least still had a roof. No walls, though—those had fallen in.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryWhat remains of the Dandagaun school is being used as a food shelter. Landslide tracks can be seen on the mountainside above it. D. Shrestha
One week later, someone showed up: a raft guide named Megh Ale, who operates an eco-resort on the Bhote Koshi. He arrived with some medical supplies, volunteers, and not enough food. Upon seeing the extent of the devastation, he approached the Deujas. Ale told the cousins to head to Kathmandu and find a bed-and-breakfast called the Yellow House. Over the past two weeks, as the government and large international NGOs have struggled to deliver supplies in Nepal’s remote regions, the Yellow House has emerged as the hub of a vibrant guerrilla aid operation run by a handful of young people armed with little more than Facebook, open source mapping technology, local knowledge, and some antiestablishment verve.
Unregistered, unlicensed, and nonexistent in official terms, the Yellow House group is one of many ad hoc efforts that have cropped up to deliver aid to some of the quake’s hardest-hit areas quickly and without much fuss. Recently, the milieu at the Yellow House has expanded from urbane young Nepalis and wide-eyed international travelers to include prominent NGOs such as Team Rubicon, a group of US military vets sponsored by the Home Depot. Even the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has started delivering supplies through the group. But Sandesh and Dipak didn’t know any of that, nor would they have particularly cared. They just needed some rice and tarps, given the forthcoming monsoons. So they recruited two of the town’s other young, strong men. Then they started walking down the mountain.
Working Outside the System
Everyone knew this earthquake—the first one at least—was coming. Many, though, are surprised that it didn’t exact a steeper toll. Before Tuesday’s 7.3-magnitude aftershock, the death count was around 8,000—a fraction of what many experts had predicted for such a massive event so near Kathmandu. That the quake happened during the day and not in winter or the monsoon season seems a small mercy. It also occurred on Saturday, a holy day when schools are closed. “I expected a much higher death toll and much higher destruction,” says Bill Berger, the USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team leader. Berger, who has lived in Nepal for 18 years and anticipated this quake for about that long, notes that many relief teams were actually well prepared, digging water wells in open spaces in Kathmandu in advance of the disaster and building a storage unit at the airport to avoid backlogs on the tarmac.
Still, you wouldn’t know that from reading the local and international press. In the two weeks since the earthquake, papers have been filled with invective over the government’s sluggishness in delivering aid. International search and rescue teams immediately swarmed the city but managed to save only a handful of people before being called off. After that they could frequently be seen in Thamel, Kathmandu’s storied hippie haven, drinking beer or shopping for cashmere in full technical gear. The government launched a Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, which all new NGOs had to funnel their money through. Aid groups started to deliver reams of goods, but most of them stuck to areas close to Kathmandu for the first week or so. “The government requires lots of paperwork and rules, even in times of disaster,” one official with a majore international aid group told me. “We wished we could help more people quickly, but it’s up to the government.”
A US Air Force Osprey aircraft carrying relief supplies blew the roof off a building while landing in Charikot.
There were a few absurd episodes too that didn’t help. A US Air Force Osprey aircraft carrying relief supplies blew the roof off a building while landing in Charikot. In Sindhupalchowk, some aid groups distributed reusable cloth sanitary pads. Not knowing what they were, villagers reportedly turned them into the sorts of face masks that are ubiquitous in the Kathmandu valley due to smog. Many locals griped about the government; others merely shrugged. “The narrative of ‘Oh, the government’s corrupt, nothing works, everything is slow’—that is news to exactly no one who lives here,” says Ben Ayers, Nepal Country Director of the nonprofit dZi Foundation. A lapsed climber with a hard-boiled kind of optimism, the 38-year-old American has lived in Nepal for the past 16 years, first working to improve labor conditions for porters and more recently to build schools in rural Nepal. “The only way to game the system in Nepal,” he told me, “is to work outside the system.”
With this in mind, Ayers and a crew of friends gathered at the Yellow House, a small inn in the Sanepa neighborhood, two days after the earthquake. Among them were a photographer, Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, 33, whose family owns the bed-and-breakfast; Soham Dhakal, a 40-year-old filmmaker; and Niranjan Kunwar, a 33-year-old teacher and writer who anonymously pens a gay lifestyle column. Gurung Kakshapati wanted to give out bread. Dhakal was obsessed with water filters. “We had really no idea what we were doing,” Ayers says. “We settled on a list of priorities, and then the next day they changed completely. It was anarchy.”
Gurung Kakshapati quickly emerged as the leader of the group—her family operates both the bed-and-breakfast and a Kathmandu bread factory. After everyone bickered a little more, she packed up a truck with bread and first-aid kits and drove to six towns in the Lalitpur district of Kathmandu.
The next day, Dhakal heard about a local man named Nama Budhathoki who was running an open-source-mapping nonprofit called Kathmandu Living Labs. Budhathoki was in a PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Anticipating such an event in Nepal, he then made it his mission to create an open source Kathmandu map using satellite imagery. Once the quake hit, he launched the site quakemaps.org, onto which he added layers allowing people to report earthquake data and response information in real time. Thousands of volunteer mappers in Europe and the US then worked to create precise maps of Nepal’s rugged terrain, which is otherwise extraordinarily difficult to navigate without local knowledge. Dhakal arranged to meet with Budhathoki, and the Yellow House started using the site as a sort of clearinghouse to identify areas of need; it would also come to serve as a real-time database of missions, allowing the volunteers to see, say, whether a village had already received tarps.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryKathmandu Living Labs volunteers work on an open-source map of the quake and response. Abraham Streep
The Yellow House recruited via word of mouth and started a Facebook page called Himalayan Disaster Relief Volunteer Group. Then people started showing up. A lot of people. There were doctors and students and travelers and photographers. Sumit Dayal, a Nepali photojournalist who lives in India, started a hashtag, #nepalphotoproject, to provide accurate information on which areas had received aid and which hadn’t. Soon he had 60,000 Instagram followers and the project was featured on a Time blog. He used the attention to direct followers to the Yellow House and other similar pop-up aid groups that materialized in the days after the quake.
But no one was as efficient or technologically savvy as Yellow House. The group’s organizers asked friends in Belgium and the US to start crowdfunding campaigns. It became apparent that the most pressing needs were rice and tarps. While search and rescue teams were looking for the last survivors and big aid groups were still scrambling to ramp up their operations, the Yellow House sent some of the first supplies to western Sindhupalchowk and Gorkha, the epicenter of the April 25 quake. In Sindhupalchowk, volunteers including a British nurse who moonlights as a fairy-tale writer found three villagers in need of evacuations. One had been hemorrhaging for 12 days since suffering a miscarriage during the earthquake; another had a broken pelvis; a third, sepsis. Using Facebook, Gurung Kakshapati arranged a private helicopter medevac.
In the first two weeks after the disaster, the group dispatched 172 missions, all of which emerged from the field intact. Eventually big groups started to take note. A volunteer whose wife works for the United Nations connected the Yellow House with the UNHCR, which provided 1,200 tarps. Still, there were hitches—one day 250 people showed up at the bed-and-breakfast and Gurung Kakshapati had to shut the doors or risk being overwhelmed. Then three trucks broke down in Dhading. Later, Gurung Kakshapati’s phone rang: It was a tax official. She gasped. Had they screwed something up with the crowdfunding? No—the guy needed some supplies for a village in Dhading, and he wanted to know if the Yellow House team would help. “In Nepal you always somehow end up being in the wrong place at the right time,” says Ayers of the dZi Foundation. “There have been times in the past two weeks when we’d look at each other and say, ‘This is our finest hour.’”
Click to Open Overlay GalleryNayantara Kakshapati Gurung watches a truck setting off on a relief mission from the Yellow House, the pop-up aid group she started. Abraham Streep
As of last weekend, the Yellow House was planning to scale down. The big NGOs were up and running, and they have resources that small efforts can’t match. The Yellow House raised about $75,000 for the quake through its crowdfunding campaigns; USAID, on the other hand, has pledged $23.5 million to relief. Then there’s the matter of safety. The more missions the groups send out, the higher the probability for an episode worse than a broken-down truck. Still, as USAID’s Berger notes, “It’s all hands on deck. There’s no country in the world that would be getting everything to everybody that needed it, never mind one with this terrain. That’s why it’s important that neighbors are helping neighbors. International aid is not solving this. It’s got to be the people of Nepal. We augment the government’s capacity and help in every way we can to get as much out as quickly as possible, but aid doesn’t get everywhere immediately—especially with villages at high altitude.”
Over the course of two afternoons at the bed-and-breakfast last week, I saw members of Team Rubicon, the nonprofit run by former US military vets, gathered in the backyard, planning a mission while sitting near a large yellow wall covered in handwritten signs like FREE SURGICAL, MEDICAL TREATMENT and 50+ MOTORCYCLE RIDERS AVAILABLE. Nepali hipsters cut up huge swaths of plastic sheeting into tarps out front, near a fleet of motorcycles. A couple showed up who operate a trekking outfit out of the devastated Langtang region. They needed supplies for 600 families who helped run guesthouses, and the government had frozen their funds temporarily. Could the Yellow House help? An American woman walked into the backyard, looked around quizzically, and asked Niranjan Kunwar, the teacher and writer, “Who are you with?” Kunwar looked up from his laptop, on which he was organizing a mission, paused, and said, “No one, really.”
Going Upriver to Save Lives
The prerequisites for joining a Yellow House mission aren’t too onerous. You just show up and fill out a form with your name, an emergency contact, and a list of whatever supplies you’re carrying. You receive a brief volunteer training. Then off you go. On Thursday morning, I signed up for a trip to Sindhupalchowk. Joining me were an energetic Nepali Dartmouth student, a 27-year-old trekker from the States who canceled his return flight home so he could help, and a stoic, ready-for-anything Nepali trekking guide. At about 9 am we were given a quick briefing—bring a sleeping bag, good luck, and please come back was the gist of it—and then we met the rest of our team: the Deuja cousins—Sandesh and Dipak—and their two buddies from Dandagaun.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryDipak Deuja in front of the Off Road Express, which he and his cousin Sandesh used to deliver supplies to their village Dandagaun. Abraham Streep
After a long trip down the mountain that crushed their village, they had taken a bus to Kathmandu. There Sandesh, who drives a truck transporting goods in and out of China, had picked up his boss’s vehicle. A brightly painted Tata trailer with the words OFF ROAD EXPRESS on the front bumper, it had six massive tires and doors that stayed closed only sporadically. The Yellow House set the guys up with 525 kilograms of rice and 182 tarps—one per family in Dandagaun. Half of the tarps came from the UNHCR, and half of them came from an Indian aid relief group that was bringing supplies across the border. Once we loaded them up, Sandesh, who appeared to be in charge, said simply, “Go.”
He took the wheel. The red, purple, and yellow tassels hanging from the roof of the cab fluttered as he navigated Kathmandu’s streets, Dipak occasionally using sticks to lift power lines above the truck. We left the city and climbed. Sindhupalchowk is about 60 miles from Kathmandu; if you’re driving quickly, you can make it in three or four hours. We were driving quickly. Dipak, sitting on the passenger’s side, held his door shut with a tough embrace. The visible quake damage increased the farther we drove into the mountains. Soon fully intact buildings became anomalies. Sandesh cranked Indian pop music. At various points we were stopped by police and army officers. As aid has started reaching the mountains, reports have emerged of desperate villagers looting trucks. Now most aid trucks are required to have armed escorts. Each time the army waved over Sandesh, though, he explained he was a member of the Sindhupalchowk community and managed to talk his way out of being assigned to a convoy.
People walked the streets wearing blank expressions. Here was a man with a makeshift cast on his leg. There women sat under a broken roof, selling soda. A cow crouched under a small tarp.
Then we arrived at the entrance of the Sindhupalchowk district. Underneath a big, curving arch were a throng of officers and a line of camouflaged vehicles. One bore a Swiss flag, another Chinese characters. An officer waved the truck over and informed Sandesh that no one could enter Sindhupalchowk unescorted on account of recent looting. To which Sandesh replied, essentially, “I’m just going home, man.” The officer waved him through.
The towns along the road, which tracks the curve of the Bhote Koshi, were all decimated, and people walked the streets wearing blank expressions. Here was a man with a makeshift cast on his leg. There women sat under a broken roof, selling soda. A cow crouched under a small tarp.
The Chinese, Canadians, and Swiss drove Polaris four-wheel-drive vehicles around, looking busy. We came upon a Canadian army vehicle attempting a slow and awkward six-point turn beneath a recently cleared landslide. The driver was a thickset guy in wraparound sunglasses, a helmet, and full combat kit. As he backed up, Sandesh blared his horn and whipped the Off Road Express around the Polaris, wheels teetering on the sheer edge of the road. The Canadian wore an expression of disbelief. Sandesh cranked the music, looked into the back of the cab, and for one moment his permanent glower turned into a huge smile. I thought of Robin Hood merrily distributing goods through Sherwood Forest. But then, Robin Hood’s neighbors weren’t beheaded by falling rocks.
The tracks of landslides were visible everywhere. It started to rain. We picked up a couple of officers from the UNHCR on the side of the road, who wanted to survey Dandagaun and see their Yellow House tarps delivered. They appeared relieved to follow a local vehicle. Often Sandesh slowed the truck to shake the hands of friends. It took on the feeling of a clandestine victory lap. At one point we all hopped out, and villagers started approaching quickly, eying our supplies. Sandesh and Dipak pointed at the truck with urgent looks on their faces. We all got back in and he drove on until we reached the rafting resort run by Megh Ale, where we camped by the river.
At 5 the next morning, Dipak shook our tent: “It’s late,” he said. We unloaded the goods for his village into a smaller truck and all the Nepalis hopped on the bed, on top of a giant tarp covering the supplies. The two foreigners on the trip—Gula and myself—were told to ride in the smaller UN vehicle so as to attract the least attention to the supply truck. The 10-mile drive to Dandagaun took more than an hour. When we arrived just outside the village light was filtering through the trees and reflecting off the river far below, and a massive landslide blocked the road to Dandagaun. We stopped, and villagers materialized in a long line. As he passed out blankets, Sandesh told me that his family of 15 would receive one bag of rice for his efforts.
After a couple of hours the goods were delivered, and Dipak took me past the landslide to see his home, which sits on a small plateau facing southeast. The ridge above the plateau was striped with white slashes that looked to be about a quarter mile long and a hundred yards wide: more landslides. The one directly above his home hadn’t come down all the way yet. The monsoons would arrive in a month, threatening to turn the loose rock and soil to mudslides. Cracks in the earth were visible everywhere. “What do we do?” Dipak asked. “It’s not safe here.”
Dipak didn’t know what to do about the other 1,400 people living in the shadow of the loose ridge. ‘I want to save my village,’ he said. ‘But what do I do?’
He said he planned to move his family to another village. When that was done, maybe in a month, he hoped to go to India, to join a friend’s multilevel-marketing business. He was done with his previous job driving trucks—he only made about 5,000 Nepalese rupees, or $50, a month doing that. The other business he’d tried, importing mobile phones, wasn’t much better. He needed to provide for his wife, Shunita. But he didn’t know what to do about the other 1,400 people living in the shadow of the loose ridge. “I want to save my village,” he said. “But what do I do?” We walked to what was left of the school—a frame and roof. Here a group of young women sat near the village’s last stores of corn. An older woman with a wizened face walked by and said, “I am alive, but I will die here.”
We went to see Dipak’s family. His father, mother, grandmother, and brother stood in a sturdy makeshift structure of wood and corrugated metal. Shunita, a beautiful woman in her twenties, sat at a small nearby shelter, cooking dal bhat. Dipak too had received one bag of rice for his family of 14, but he insisted on feeding all the volunteers. “Now we eat,” he said, cracking a huge smile. “Eat!”
After lunch, he and Sandesh gathered the group and put their hands in a circle. They counted out: “One, two, three, Nepal!” throwing their hands in the air. A few minutes later the earth shuddered with a deep, resonant whump—an aftershock. The group paused and waited. No rocks came down. I left with the UN vehicle, and Sandesh and Dipak led the group up the mountain. They were headed to a village called Deurali. It was on the far side of the ridge, and no aid had arrived there yet.
Four days later, Nepal exploded yet again. On Tuesday at 12:35 pm, that magnitude 7.3 aftershock hit. In Kathmandu, Gurung Kakshapati, Ayers and the rest of the Yellow House crew were fine. Gurung Kakshapti told me that most people had gone to sleep outside and that her neighbors had started blowing whistles at every aftershock. But in Nepal, it’s always the people who can afford it least who seem to get hardest hit. The epicenter of the second quake was near the border of the Sindhupalchowk and Dolakha districts, 15 miles or so from Dandagaun. On Tuesday morning, a relief team from the Yellow House was on its way to deliver further supplies to Dipak and Sandesh. When the quake hit, they had to turn back. The Deuja boys were up on the mountain to fend for themselves.
We have heard about rumors in Nepal that there has been some earthquake prediction. THIS IS NOT TRUE. There is no earthquake prediction today, it does not exist. Scientists are able in some cases to identify what is called seismic hot spots. Hot spots are areas where a large earthquake can be expected in time period ranging from tens to hundreds of years. But science is unable to predict when an earthquake will strike. Well known hot spots are for example, Istanbul, Tokyo or Los Angeles.
M7.8 earthquake of April 25th
A very powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.8 hit Nepal on Saturday April 25th, 2015 at 06:11 UTC (11:56 local time). More information on the main shock is available here. The epicentre was located 80 north-west of Kathmandu.
The earthquake caused major damage in Kathmandu and in surrounding cities. The death toll exceeds 8,000 victims.
Many buildings in the region have been destroyed, including a number of centuries-old temples. A number of landslides have also been reported in the area and the earthquake also triggered a “huge avalanche” on Mount Everest, which killed at least 17 people at it’s base camp.
The shake has been felt all over Nepal, India and Bangladesh as far as Kerala, India, more than 2,200 km away.
On May 12th at 07:05 UTC (12:50 Nepal time) a M7.3 earthquake occurred at the eastern end of the rupture zone that caused the M7.8 of April 25th. This powerful earthquake made 66 victims and more than 1,000 injured.
Comparison between April 25th and May 12th earthquakes
Preliminary source study provided by CEA/DASE/LDG (Bruyères-le-Châtel, France):
18 teleseismic good quality GSN broadband waveforms are retrieved from IRIS servers and processed with the patch method (Vallee et al. 2004). For frequencies lower than 6 seconds, one patch of slip is sufficient to ensure a good fit between data (in black) and synthetics (in red) for both P waves (outer red ring) and SH waves (inner yellow ring).
The found fault plane is very similar to that of Mw7.8 25 April earthquake, with a bilateral rupture which extends in both South-East and North-West directions. The maximum amount of slip on the fault is about 2 meters and horizontal extension is about 60km. These results are preliminary, further work is needed to confirm these fast estimated fault parameters.
The aftershock distribution shows a ruptures zones which starts from the main shock and extends approx. 150 km to the south-east (Figures 1 and 2).
Two of these aftershocks are of magnitude 6.7. The first occurred 34 minutes after the first shock and very close to it. The second occurred 25 hours after the main shock and 135 km away, at the other end of the rupture zone (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1: Aftershocks geographic distribution
Figure 2: Aftershocks and population density
Figure 3: Aftershocks time distribution
Figure 4: Aftershocks rate
Internet Earthquake Detection and map of the felt area
M7.8 of April 25th
M7.3 of May 12th
When an earthquake is felt by the population, the eye-witnesses rush on the internet to find out the cause of the shaking. When they reach EMSC website, we automatically detect the surge of traffic, locate the eye-witnesses thanks to their IP adress and map the area where the earthquake was felt.
This technique allows us to quickly detect felt earthquakes (within 1 or 2 minutes) and map the felt area before the first seismic data are available.
You were on the spot and you have taken photos or videos of earthquake effects (on buildings, ground, landscape), please send us your files. Send them by mail or upload them directly from your computer. Just click on the link below :
KATHMANDU (Reuters) – The number of people killed in Nepal by two major earthquakes has surpassed 8,500, making the disaster the deadliest to hit the Himalayan country on record, as rescuers on Sunday searched for dozens of people still missing in remote villages.
A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, killing thousands and demolishing more than half a million homes, most of them in rural areas cut off from emergency medical care.
A second major quake struck on Tuesday 76 kilometers (47 miles) east of the capital Kathmandu, just as Nepalis were beginning to recover from the previous earthquake.
The death toll from the two quakes now stands at 8,583, the home ministry said on Sunday.
The previous deadliest earthquake to strike the country – in 1934 – killed at least 8,519 in Nepal, as well as thousands more in neighboring India.
In Dolakha district east of Kathmandu, which was hit hardest by the second quake, dozens of landslides have blocked access to remote villages.
In Singati village, devastated by a landslide, dozens are still missing and rescue workers are yet to remove debris from all of the village to recover bodies, district officials said.
Prime Minister Sushil Koirala told reporters on Sunday 58 foreigners had died in the two earthquakes. Koirala said 112 foreigners were still unaccounted for, although many of those could be backpackers who choose not to register with authorities when they leave the country.
(Reporting by Tommy Wilkes and Gopal Sharma; Editing by Dominic Evans)
All groups that assist villages with any food and supplies should also report that information to the concerned VDC (village development committee) via this form:
Its very important for relief teams and volunteer groups to coordinate with the Nepal Government especially local VDC’s (village development committees) if they want clearance to enter Nepal from any land borders or at the airport. Registered international agencies can get a stamped letter of permission from the Nepali Government to show to any border police at any checkpoints.
More information on this later about who to contact….
Loading, please wait…
Random Kindness Project 