When it rains it pours

This late monsoon storm was not a surprise. Weather forecasts had warned of heavy precipitation a week before, the Met Office predicted heavy rain on 27-28 September, SMS warned people to take precaution, radio stations issued bulletins, and night buses were banned in 56 districts. 

The tragedy was compounded because we knew what was coming, and did not do enough to prepare. The accurate weather forecast made no real difference on the ground. When it started raining on Thursday morning and did not stop till Saturday, there was no sense of the scale of this emergency.     

More than 200 people lost their lives, dozens are still missing. Thousands of homes were swept away, Nepal lost nearly half its electricity generation capacity because of damage to power plants, Kathmandu has been nearly cut off with bridges and sections of highways swept away.

Yes, this was primarily a natural disaster. Kathmandu Valley and its surroundings got half the average annual precipitation in just 40 hours, the heaviest rainfall measured since records started being kept in 1972. But the high death toll was totally manmade. 

Three buses were buried by a mudslide in Dhading, killing at least 35 people. This was an eerie reminder of the Simaltal accident on 12 July when two intercity buses were swept by a mudflow into the Trisuli River at night, killing 62. The buses have still not been found. 

In both cases, heavy rainfall on a poorly engineered local road up the mountains triggered the initial landslide that swept debris to the highway below. This was manslaughter, not an ‘accident’. 

We said it then, and we are saying it now: most mountain roads follow no reason or science. It is a corruption-fed activity in which local governments and their cronies plan roads ad hoc and rent their own bulldozers. Debris accumulated during construction is dumped over the edge, where monsoon rains wash them to settlements, farms and highways below.

Last weekend’s disaster is a warning that accurate weather early warning is just the first step – it is not enough to prevent a huge loss of life. After the warnings, there should have been door-to-door miking along hazardous river banks urging people to move to higher ground, shelters should have been in place, rescue equipment and rafts pre-positioned, live monitoring of precipitation in the catchments.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) was just posting situationers on social media. The Home Ministry became a Ministry of Condolences and Empty Promises. 

This disaster is a reminder of the 1993 Central Nepal cloudburst that hit the Lothar Khola in Chitwan, the Kulekhani areas, and highways blocked highways marooning Kathmandu for weeks. More than 1,300 people were killed. 

The death toll in Kathmandu this time was compounded by the fact that the city has spread into the floodplains of the Vishnumati, Manohara and other tributaries of the Bagmati. Natural waterways have been hemmed in by streets. The rivers were just reclaiming what was theirs.

Urban pressure has also forced settlements to move up the Valley’s rim, below steep hillsides with topsoil already saturated in the late monsoon. The torrential downpours caused the slopes to fail.

The damage to Upper Tamakosi and dozens of other hydropower plants also is a warning not to put all our eggs in one basket. The Sikkim disaster exactly this time last year was proof that these are at high risk from glacial lake floods and landslide dammed rivers suddenly bursting. More logical would be to build smaller, better designed, plants on many rivers.

The Himalaya is also the youngest and most fragile mountain range on earth, Nepal has always had either too much or too little water, and climate breakdown is making this contrast more extreme. Combined, this means we in Nepal live in a multi-disaster prone country with seismic, hydrological and climate risks. 

After multiple floods in early 1990s, a Japanese grant helped set up the Disaster Prevention Technical Centre (DPTC) in Pulchowk, which was later renamed the Department of Water Induced Disaster Management. We have not heard much from them lately.

With the government AWOL, it is ordinary Nepalis who have shown extraordinary courage in saving those being swept by flood water, rescuing babies on canoes (pictured), or digging for passengers trapped in buses buried by landslides. The Nepal Army and the Police rescued thousands, but there was an absence of coordination.

Now, the attention must focus on urgent relief and rehabilitation. But that might be a tall ask just before everything shuts down for Dasain, and when governance fails, lack of accountability and transparency is the norm even without holidays. 

Sonia Awale