Here Comes the Flood

I’ve been so caught up by the constant, grotesque news of corruption within our government I’ve totally missed that there’s HUGE, incredible devastation happening in Nepal and Tibet.

Officials say more than 600 people have died and at least 2,426 people are missing following devastating flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday. (source) 

2,426 people are counted as missing SO FAR. Undoubtedly that number’s higher. How many of them are dead?

Sivaranjani Muthunathan was travelling by bus with 56 others to the Chinese border when they became stuck in what they thought was a traffic jam.

“Then there was fog, smoke, something that seemed to suddenly engulf us,” Muthunathan, 46, told Agence France-Presse on Friday, showing a phone video she recorded of a torrent surging towards her. Around them, vehicles were swept away or buried under mud. (source) 

And she survived. Just imgaine.

The Nepalese army was, as of four hours ago, digging through heavy mud that filled a hydropower tunnel. People are thought to be trapped inside. Wow, now there’s a claustrophobia igniting nightmare for me.

China enforces wickedly strict state control and censorship – they took control of Tibet in 1950. So, it’s reasonable to assume that we're not getting the full picture of what's happening on the Tibetan side of the border.

How did this flash flood happen? What was the spark?

Nepal's disaster authority (NDRRMA) described that a chunk of snow and rock broke off near the glacier zone on the Nepal-China border, about 20km northeast of the Rasuwagadhi border crossing.

That avalanche either fell into a glacial lake or blocked the river channel, and the resulting surge, carrying glacial ice, meltwater and debris -- "glacier-inclusive flood" -- swept down the Lhende Khola into the Bhote Koshi river. (source) 

There is no doubt that this is a result of a changing climate, a warming planet.

As the region warms, its ice is becoming increasingly unstable, raising the risk of catastrophic flooding.

"The glaciers over there are definitely in retreat,” says Joseph Shea, an associate professor of geography at the University of Northern British Columbia. “There’s a lot of glacier mass up there, but we’re seeing thinning, we’re seeing retreating.”

Since 2000, the world’s glaciers have lost 5 percent of their ice, with much more drastic impacts in certain regions. Nepal’s glaciers lost nearly a quarter of their area between 1970 and 2010. More than 160 smaller glaciers in the country, research has found, have vanished entirely.

A recent study finds that 40 percent of the world’s glacial ice could disappear if the world does not keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. (source) 

Weather-wise I live in a pretty calm area of the world. Sure, we get the occasional Snowmaggedon winter and there’s that time it rained so hard for so long that the peninsula Valhalla sits on turned into an island for a few days. Could be way worse! No wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes (none so big you’d notice anyway) and, best of all, relatively few climate change denying republicans. They exist but they’re seriously outnumbered.

I feel lucky. I can’t imagine hobbling around with my walker, making sure I’ve got my myriad life preserving meds with me, getting Cake into his carrier bag, and then attempting to outrun the rampaging headwaters, mud, and debris of a flood. Yup, I’d be seriously, thoroughly dead.

Here Comes the Flood – Peter Gabriel