We are with you Nepal..!!

Dear Friends,

By now you’ve heard that the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal on Saturday has devastated whole communities. Over two thousand people are already confirmed dead. There are estimates that tens of thousands more are likely dead or injured. Media reports confirm that the quake triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest, which has killed many more and temples have been decimated in Kathmandu.

During disasters women and children are disproportionately affected. We have learned this over our years of experience in relief and rehabilitation, dating back to our founding in 2001 in response to the Gujarat earthquake, and subsequent efforts including the Tsunami of 2004, the Kashmir earthquake of 2006, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and the Uttarakhand floods in 2014.

In a tragic echo of the catastrophic events in Haiti in 2010, a powerful earthquake struck one of the poorest nations on Earth today. The latest estimates from seismologists put the magnitude at 7.9, which would actually makes it about 40% larger than the 7.8 currently being reported. That's less than half the size of the previous major event nearby in 1934, which killed around 10,000 people.

Unfortunately, it is quite possible the number of dead in Kathmandu could rise to match it.

We knew this disaster was coming eventually. Geophysicists have long monitored how fast the Earth's plates are moving, and we know that the entire subcontinent of India is being driven slowly but surely underneath Nepal and Tibet at a speed of around 1.8 inches per year. It's the reason Everest exists.

Over millions of years, the squeezing has crushed the Himalayas like a concertina, raising mountains to heights of several miles and triggering earthquakes on a regular basis from Pakistan to Burma. Saturday's quake was neither unusual nor unexpected, although it was larger than most.

In the 81 years since the 1934 Bihar earthquake, the land mass of India has been pushed about 12 feet into Nepal. Think of all that movement getting stored in a giant spring lying under Nepal. The spring is stuck on a broad, rough surface which we call a fault plane (a fault line is what we see when it emerges from the ground).

Sometimes, energy stored in the spring gets big enough to slip catastrophically, releasing all that pent-up strain and generating shaking strong enough to destroy buildings and kill people over a huge area. The bigger the area that slips, and the larger the pent-up energy, the greater the damage.

Saturday's slip took place over an area about 1,000 to 2,000 square miles over a zone spanning the cities of Kathmandu and Pokhara in one direction, and almost the entire Himalaya mountain width in the other. A part of India slid about one to 10 feet northwards and underneath Nepal in a matter of seconds.

Still, this catastrophe comes at a delicate time for Nepal as it emerges from a long-running civil war and its economy has been improving steadily. We have to hope that recovery from both can somehow take place despite the enormous challenges ahead.

We at BankersAdda are saddened by this tragedy, and stand strong with our neighbors in Nepal. 

In the meantime, our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Nepal. We are with you Nepal.

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