Nepal's Destruction Was No Surprise, Says Disaster Risk Expert

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that an incredibly destructive 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the small country of Nepal over the weekend, killing more than 5,000 (according to official estimates) people and injuring 10,000. Now one risk researcher is saying that it should have been expected, while other experts are saying that the damage is bound to be much worse than initial reports are claiming.

Ripe For Disaster

Researcher Juan Pablo Sarmiento is the director of the Disaster Risk Reduction Program at Florida International University's Extreme Events Institute. Back in 2011, he was among a team of experts that visited Nepal as part of a good-faith mission on behalf of the United States. The team was committed to aiding the government of Nepal in modernizing its disaster planning and response, and as part of their duties, they assessed the likelihood of a national disaster in the near-future.

And while expert understanding of seismic events certainly isn't advanced enough to predict that the worst earthquake to ever hit Nepal in nearly a century (~80 years) was due to assault the country (animals, it appears, can sometimes tell weeks in advance), the team did determine that Nepal was "ripe for a disaster" with its vulnerable buildings and crumbling infrastructure. (Scroll to read on...)

Sarmiento also harshly criticized the government's construction standards at the time. Unlike parts of the world like Japan or California, which see frequent quakes, Nepalese buildings were constructed without any hazard-resistant technologies or reinforcement. This was usually the fault of the private sector which, in an effort to cut costs, often disregarded recommendations from the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations.

Still, it's important to note that Nepal is a developing country with an exceptionally low-income economy. As of 2014, the country ranked 145th of 187 nations on the Human Development Index, meaning that it may have simply been too poor to meet safety standards that Sarmiento and his colleagues were calling for.

Reckless disinterest in safety or the simple inability to meet acceptable standards aside, the tragic consequence remains the same. When the quake struck last Saturday, entire cities fell like a house of cards. (Scroll to read on...)

Sarmiento's colleague, a geologist by the name of Grenville Draper, added in a FIU release that because Nepal's capital city of Kathmandu sits on soft river gravel, and because the quake occurred very close to the Earth's surface, "massive devastation" was inevitable. Had the quake occurred deeper in the Earth's mantle, the shaking effect of each shock could have been partially absorbed. Instead, with the intense quake being as shallow as it was, the loose soil just made things much worse.

A Different Kind of After-Shock

How much worse, exactly? As things stand, the official death toll is just over 5,000, but as Susan Hough of the US Geological Survey (USGS) recently told The New York Times' Andrew Revkin, of Dot Earth, "predictions of fatalities is an inexact as well as a morbid science."

"This earthquake struck around mid-day, on a Saturday, and in many places the strongest shaking appears to have been preceded by tens of seconds of weaker shaking. Presumably this gave many people time to run outside," she said, trying to stay positive.

However, it's important to note that as things stand, the USGS has officially noted that the best odds are that between 10,000 and 100,000 people were killed during the quake - at least twice as high as the current count. (Scroll to read on...)

However, Max Wyss, a longtime analyst of seismic hazards affiliated with the International Center for Earth Simulation in Geneva, Switzerland, has made what Revkin called "a chillingly high projection of the eventual death count" - one all the more disturbing when it is considered how accurate Wyss has been in the past.

According to Revkin's Dot Earth blog, Weiss has settled on an expected 57,700 deaths. Using another method, he calculated 45,000. Wyss's method is described in the 2004 paper: Real-Time Prediction of Earthquake Casualties, and has been seen as reliable. It has been used by emergency aid agencies in the past.

Wyss added in an interview with Revkin that it is the Nepalese government's responsibility to acknowledge the potential scope of deaths and damage the country sustained. This knowledge, after all, will prove invaluable to the response and aid groups that are flocking to help the small country even as you read this.

"Make no mistake, responses take time," Richard S. Olson, Director of the Extreme Events Institute at FIU, added in a statement. "We haven't even seen the start of the recovery. You don't see that until day six or seven. Right now, the word is patience, however painful that is."

Meanwhile, the United Nations has announced a $415 million flash appeal to help get "life-saving assistance and protection" to the over eight million people affected by this tragedy.

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