It was a disaster everyone was waiting for. For decades. Nepal’s people have understood that their location on a major geological faultline where the landmasses of India and Asia, once apart, met, pushed together at a speed of four to five centimetres a year to throw up the great Himalayan mountain range, meant that their home was fit to burst asunder one of these days.
In preparing for the inevitable, children in Kathmandu had even been issued with whistles so they could help searchers find them in the rubble. But a combination of economic and infrastructural underdevelopment, ancient buildings and lax building standards, ensured that when the earthquake came it would have particularly devastating effect. In Kathmandu’s overcrowded streets there is no escape .
Previous quakes in 1934 and 1988 killed 10,000 and 1,000 respectively, and the non-profit GeoHazards International has warned that major quakes are likely in the region once every 75 years. Saturday’s 7.9 magnitude tremor is likely to have caused up to 5,000 deaths, observers fear. And some six million of the 28 million population live in areas affected by the disaster, notably the capital. The earthquake “translated the whole city southward by 10 feet,” explains Roger Bilham, a professor of geology at the University of Colorado. Steep mountain slopes in the area are prone to avalanches like the one triggered by the quake on Mount Everest on Saturday.
The prompt international response is vital and welcome; the humanitarian need, immediate. Supplies, particularly of water, are already depleted, hospitals overrun, communications sparce, and the road networks such that many vulnerable communities have not yet been reached.
But it will be crucial that the international community begins already to plan for the long-term reconstruction assistance that the country desperately needs. Nepal, which only emerged in 2006 from a prolonged Maoist insurgency, has yet to find any real degree of political cohesion or properly functioning government. It has 125 ethnic groups, 127 spoken languages, scores of castes and three distinct ecosystems that have divided it into feuding communities – what one writer has described as a "kaleidoscope of communities" in an impassable mountain terrain that, he argues, makes "consensus all but impossible".
In truth the country’s basket-case economy has been in reverse gear – poverty is endemic, air pollution choking, manufacturing declining to some 6 per cent of the economy, while soaring emigration last year saw 1,500 a day leaving for temporary jobs abroad – migrant remittances now represent close to 30 per cent of its $19.5 billion GDP (70 per cent of them from the building sites of the Gulf economies). The earthquake may be the final straw – Nepal desperately needs our help.