Many words could be used to describe the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated central Nepal on April 25, but “unexpected” is not one of them.
Sitting on the gigantic pileup resulting from the collision 50 million years ago of the Indian plate with the Eurasian land mass, the country is literally on the move as India continues to plough into and under the Tibetan plateau. Kathmandu is situated almost on top of the fault line where the plates meet.
A mega-earthquake hits Nepal every 100 years or so and there are historical records that go back 800 years of kingdoms destroyed and kings killed in earthquakes. The last big one was in 1934. It was of 8.3 magnitude and killed 10,000 people in Kathmandu at a time when its population was just 250,000. Today, it is a teeming metropolis of nearly three million and at the top of the list of cities most vulnerable to earthquakes. Therefore, it was never a question of “if” , but “when”. One 2011 estimate showed that an earthquake of the same intensity as 1934 would destroy 60 per cent of the buildings in Kathmandu Valley, killing more than 100,000 people outright. And that wasn’t even the worst-case scenario.
So, we can’t say that we were not warned. But it has exposed the government’s failure to enforce building codes for seismic-resistant housing and the woeful lack of preparedness for the aftermath. In the past decade, it has seemed that diplomats and other foreigners in Kathmandu were more worried about a big earthquake than Nepalis. Embassies would conduct earthquake drills and a consortium of donors had been pressuring the government to set up a Disaster Preparedness Authority.
When it finally happened, the earthquake turned out to be much less damaging than predicted. At least 1,300 people were killed in Kathmandu, but that was much less than had been predicted. One reason could have been that the first jolt was 7.8 magnitude and the epicentre was 80km away. Recently constructed concrete housing largely remained intact, the mobile phone network never went down, Kathmandu airport was back up after a few hours, landslides were quickly cleared and electricity was restored within a few days.
Kathmandu was lucky to have got off so lightly, but the surrounding districts did not. There lived mostly subsistence farmers, isolated communities with rudimentary health services even in the best of times. Their flimsy stone and mud structures just fell apart. In many of these scenic villages, perched on steep mountainsides, not even a single house has been left standing. Entire villages have been wiped off the map by landslides or massive avalanches. Even a week after the disaster, we don't know the true extent of the death and destruction. The government put the death toll at about 6,000 outside Kathmandu, but admitted that this was just the official body count.
You could say that this devastation in the mountains was unexpected. But even here, the casualty rate could have been much higher. What saved many lives was that the earthquake hit when children were not at the 15,000 schools that were destroyed. It struck just before noon, when many families had already eaten and were out in their potato patches, or readying the terrace farms for maize. Many of the affected districts had also seen up to a third of their population migrate in the past decade.
But the overall lack of preparedness can be blamed on politics. Nepal was wracked by violent conflict, and remained mired in instability even after its end in 2006. Two elections have been held for an assembly to draft a new constitution, but a dispute over the form of federalism has led to deadlock. At the local level, earthquake relief is slow because there are no village and district councils as there have been no local elections for 18 years.
In other countries, catastrophic natural disasters have led to the resolution of long-running conflicts. Let’s hope Nepal’s politicians also unite, find a compromise on the constitution and start rebuilding the country.
Kunda Dixit is the editor of the Nepali Times newspaper in
Kathmandu
