Week Before Quake, Experts Warned Of Looming Danger

Scientists convened in Kathmandu to figure out how to plan for disaster in overcrowded city just days before devastating temblor

Nepal’s devastating earthquake was the disaster experts knew was coming.

Just a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world came to Kathmandu, Nepal, to figure out how to get this poor, congested, overdeveloped, shoddily built area to prepare better for the big one, a repeat of the 1934 temblor that leveled this city.

They knew they were racing the clock, but they didn’t know when what they feared would strike.

“It was sort of a nightmare waiting to happen,” said seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England. “Physically and geologically what happened is exactly what we thought would happen.”

But he didn’t expect the massive quake that struck Saturday to happen so soon.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed nearly 1,400 and counting and caused widespread destruction.

“I was walking through that very area where that earthquake was and I thought at the very time that the area was heading for trouble,” said Jackson, lead scientist for Earthquakes Without Frontiers, a group that tries to make Asia more able to bounce back from these disasters and was having the meeting.

A Kathmandu earthquake has long been feared, not just because of the natural seismic fault, but because of the local, more human conditions that make it worse.

The same size shaking can have bigger effects on different parts of the globe because of building construction and population and that’s something the US Geological Survey calculates ahead of time.

So the same level of severe shaking would cause 10 to 30 people to die per million residents in California, but 1,000 maybe more in Nepal, and up to 10,000 in parts of Pakistan, India, Iran and China, said USGS seismologist David Wald.

While the trigger of the disaster is natural — an earthquake — “the consequences are very much man-made,” Jackson said. Except for landslides, which in this case are a serious problem, “it’s buildings that kill people, not earthquakes,” Jackson said. If you lived in a flat desert with no water, an earthquake wouldn’t harm you, but then few people want to live there.

“The real problem in Asia is how people have concentrated in dangerous places,” Jackson said.

Kathmandu was warned, first by the Earth itself: this is the fifth significant quake there in the last 205 years, including the massive 1934 one.

“They knew they had a problem but it was so large they didn’t where to start, how to start,” said Hari Ghi, southeast Asia regional coordinator for Geohazards International, a group that works on worldwide quake risks. Ghi, Jackson and Wald said Nepal was making progress on reducing its vulnerability to earthquakes, but not quickly or big enough.

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And History Crumbles As Nepal Earthquake Kills Hundreds Shakes Mount Everest

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A powerful earthquake struck Nepal Saturday, killing at least 906 people across a swath of four countries as the violently shaking earth collapsed houses, leveled centuries-old temples and triggered avalanches on Mt. Everest. It was the worst tremor to hit the poor South Asian nation in over 80 years.

At least 876 people were confirmed dead in Nepal, according to the police. Another 20 were killed in India, six in Tibet and two in Bangladesh. Two Chinese citizens died at the Nepal-China border. The death toll is almost certain to rise, said deputy Inspector General of Police Komal Singh Bam.

It was a few minutes before noon when the quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 7.8, began to rumble across the densely populated Kathmandu Valley, rippling through the capital Kathmandu and spreading in all directions -- north toward the Himalayas and Tibet, south to the Indo-Gangetic plains, east toward the Brahmaputra delta of Bangladesh and west toward the historical city of Lahore in Pakistan.

Shirish Vaidya, a businessman, was with his family in his two-story house on the outskirts of Kathmandu, when the quake struck.

"It is hard to describe. The house was shaking like crazy. We ran out and it seemed like the road was heaving up and down," he told The Associated Press. "I don't remember anything like this before. Even my parents can't remember anything this bad."

A magnitude-6.6 aftershock hit about an hour later, and smaller aftershocks continued to jolt the region for hours.

Residents ran out of homes and buildings in panic. Walls tumbled, trees swayed, power lines came crashing down and large cracks opened up on streets and walls. And clouds of dust began to swirl all around.

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