Commentary
The world will remember Nepal’s unprecedented disaster for its scale, devastation and loss of life. But alongside the stories of death and destruction, another story deserves to be remembered: the ingenuity, courage and kindness of ordinary people who saved lives when technology failed.
Nepal’s rivers carry names drawn from the gods and goddesses of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, reflecting the sacred geography of the Himalayas. The Trishuli River, which bore the brunt of this disaster, takes its name from Shiva’s trident, or trishul. According to Hindu tradition, Shiva cast his trident into the earth, bringing forth the river.
The symbolism is difficult to miss. A river embedded in Nepal’s sacred landscape became the center of a disaster that struck another sacred landscape upstream: the route to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet, a pilgrimage destination for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, and also the origin of two most important South Asian rivers, the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo (called Brahmaputra in India and Jamuna in Bangladesh).
Of the thousands of people missing or unaccounted for, more than 400 were pilgrims traveling toward Kailash Manasarovar, according to NDTV.
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The affected area is not an isolated wilderness. The Nepal-China border crossing is an important point of cross-border movement, situated along a major pilgrimage and trade route. Yet there was no functioning disaster-warning system capable of alerting people in time to what was coming.
The disaster therefore raises a question far larger than what happened on a single river or at an isolated border crossing: How prepared are the Himalayas for disasters along the international routes that connect communities, economies, and sacred sites?
That should prompt a preparedness audit across the glacier-fed Himalayas — particularly along the pilgrimage, trade, and migration corridors that run through Nepal, India, Bhutan, and China.
China’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported that “the first emergency communication base station near the border gate at Gyirong Port on the China-Nepal border in southwest China’s Xizang Autonomous Region was put into operation at 1:30 p.m. Sunday [August 30], according to China Unicom.”
Xizang is the phonetic spelling of the Chinese name for Tibet, which borders Nepal.
This emergency communication base set up four days after the disaster is 1.2 kilometers from the now decimated border gate and is established to fill a “communication gap” to support rescue operations, road clearance and material support to frontline workers, according to the report.
Yet Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology had already equipped the Nepal-China border crossing with a flood sensor designed to transmit data every 10 minutes. For reasons that remain unclear, its last successfully received reading was at 8:40 a.m. The next reading, scheduled for 8:50 a.m. — around the time the disaster struck — never arrived, according to Online Khabar, a Nepali news outlet.
The same failure occurred at another monitoring station roughly 36 kilometers downstream, at Betrawati. The flood traveled those 36 kilometers in about 40 minutes. But the Betrawati sensor transmitted its last reading at 9:20 a.m.; its next reading, at 9:30 a.m., was never received. The force of an estimated 200 million cubic meters of surging water then destroyed flood-monitoring equipment at five stations farther downstream.
“We had installed most of the equipment on bridges, considering them relatively safe and strong structures,” Binod Parajuli, chief of the Flood Forecasting Section at Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, told Online Khabar. “But the bridges themselves were swept away, along with the equipment.”
These failures expose a difficult truth about disaster preparedness. Even sophisticated and expensive warning systems are of little use if they cannot withstand the disaster they are designed to predict — or if their warnings cannot reach people in time.
And yet, in the moments when technology failed or was absent, something more elemental proved remarkably powerful: human ingenuity, instinct and kindness.
When the infrastructure was overwhelmed, people improvised. When the warning systems faltered, individuals made decisions that saved lives.
Consider Rajendra Dawadi, the principal of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Bidur, Nuwakot District. After a warning arrived, he swiftly moved about 900 students and 16 teachers upstream, away from the danger. His quick decision potentially saved hundreds of lives.
Then there is Gunmaya Bohra, a 97-year-old woman who was rescued after spending nine hours trapped in mud and debris in the Trishuli market area.
In Dunge Market, along the Trishuli River, Prakash Pandey Pyakurel and his wife, Laxmi Pandey, were rescued from a lone surviving greenhouse — one of the few structures left standing amid the destruction.
At Gyirong Port, where dramatic footage showed the imposing Chinese customs building swept away in an instant by the cascade of rock and ice, border control officer Huang Peng ran to a tourist service center, and helped warn civilians to escape by shouting at them to evacuate immediately. Huang Peng himself was caught in the deluge and remains missing.
And then there is Manish Maharjan, a Nepali filmmaker and drone pilot who joined the Nepal Army’s rescue efforts following the Aug. 26 floods. He used voices and music broadcast from his drone to locate people stranded in areas that rescuers could not easily reach. His unconventional approach helped rescuers find survivors in several cases.
Resilience in a disaster is not simply a matter of technology or infrastructure. It is also a matter of human capacity: the ability to recognize danger, act decisively, improvise when plans fail, and help another person without knowing whether help will ever come for you.
Life with all its amenities will take time to be reestablished in the flood impacted areas but everyday until any state of normalcy is achieved, it’ll be hope, kindness and other fundamental human qualities and human capacity that will keep amply exhibiting itself.
When everything else is swept away, people remain capable of becoming the warning, the rescue and, sometimes, the reason someone survives.
Original article
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