CapitalizedLiving
Gold Member
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- Dec 1, 2007
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Hey Andrew! I've been scared to ask... but how is everyone doing after last weekend's flooding in Kathmandu? Is everyone ok?
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Kathmandu floods
- Thread starter CapitalizedLiving
- Start date
Kailash Blades
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2015
- Messages
- 1,028
Hey there!
I asked the team to put a post together about it yesterday to fill people in- hopefully it'll be up soon.
Our team and their families are all well. Our workshops and homes are not on the valley floor so we've not been impacted by the waters directly. In terms of our operations there has been a huge amount damage done to the already unstable electricity grid though which has slowed down a lot of works and made some processes very difficult. Things are moving though and as we were already trying to reduce our forge queue down to zero before dashain we have a good buffer that means there shouldn't be any delays.
One need only look at the headlines to see the impact on the rest of the country though. Large and growing loss of life, homes and livelihoods destroyed. It caps off an extremely wet year that was already full of landslides. The team are very quick to blame it on climate change as it's a very heavy fall and so strange for it to occur so late in the wet season. Over the past years it's been a consistent theme when speaking with the team- that the weather and it's cycles don't make sense anymore. It's usually consistently very hot and very rainy during the monsoon but they recently had a long dry patch which had everyone on edge. scorching weather but no clouds to block the sun and no rain for evaporative cooling. Everyone was quite surprised and the houses are not really designed for it. Their bodies are also not accustomed to the dry heat and a lot of the community, particularly the elderly fell ill. I wonder if the greater number of named seasons in Nepal provides a higher resolution for noticing such chang
The other perhaps more directly relevant issue is that the flooding has been worsened by pretty mindless urban development. Anyone building whatever they want wherever they want without thinking about the big picture. Short term thinking to make a quick buck that creates big issues for the entire region in the long term. This is a bigger problem in Nepal that can really be described and impacts a lot of people very negatively. Relevant to this current flood is that a lot of the farms, rice paddies and scrub that used to make up the land usage of the valley floor has been bought up cheap and turned into suburbs. A lot of the hills have been concreted and paved so runoff is quick there too. Then the water has nowhere to soak in slowly on the way to the river so you get these higher peak flash flooding events. Awareness of these issues is growing but a solution requires an ambitious combined effort from multiple levels of government and for the people of Nepal to respect their government. Nepalese politicians are not ambitious and have done very little to earn this respect in most peoples' lifetimes.
The plus side is that the Nepalese people are very tough. Crises are common as a geographic, economic and political reality in Nepal and there is some level of psychological and systemic adaptation that is forced to take place. While they do push towards development there is usually one foot left in the past- in older, more resilient ways of living that they can fall back too in times of crisis and hardship. In Australia if the country ran out of fuel for an extended period of time it would probably be the end of the nation as we know it. I was there when Nepal faced a trade blockade and ran out of petrol (and other imports) for months- families already lived together so nobody was isolated. Farms relied more on animals to pull loads. Nepal's food is mostly locally made and many suburban houses have very solid gardens, chickens, goats and even cows. It was not easy though and hospitals in particular were pushed beyond breaking point, struggling to provide medicine and keep generators running for crucial machines during brownouts.
It's not that the events that impact the nepalese people are less awful. But their systems and ways of living allow them to withstand them better than others would.
Take care,
Andrew and the team at Kailash.
I asked the team to put a post together about it yesterday to fill people in- hopefully it'll be up soon.
Our team and their families are all well. Our workshops and homes are not on the valley floor so we've not been impacted by the waters directly. In terms of our operations there has been a huge amount damage done to the already unstable electricity grid though which has slowed down a lot of works and made some processes very difficult. Things are moving though and as we were already trying to reduce our forge queue down to zero before dashain we have a good buffer that means there shouldn't be any delays.
One need only look at the headlines to see the impact on the rest of the country though. Large and growing loss of life, homes and livelihoods destroyed. It caps off an extremely wet year that was already full of landslides. The team are very quick to blame it on climate change as it's a very heavy fall and so strange for it to occur so late in the wet season. Over the past years it's been a consistent theme when speaking with the team- that the weather and it's cycles don't make sense anymore. It's usually consistently very hot and very rainy during the monsoon but they recently had a long dry patch which had everyone on edge. scorching weather but no clouds to block the sun and no rain for evaporative cooling. Everyone was quite surprised and the houses are not really designed for it. Their bodies are also not accustomed to the dry heat and a lot of the community, particularly the elderly fell ill. I wonder if the greater number of named seasons in Nepal provides a higher resolution for noticing such chang
The other perhaps more directly relevant issue is that the flooding has been worsened by pretty mindless urban development. Anyone building whatever they want wherever they want without thinking about the big picture. Short term thinking to make a quick buck that creates big issues for the entire region in the long term. This is a bigger problem in Nepal that can really be described and impacts a lot of people very negatively. Relevant to this current flood is that a lot of the farms, rice paddies and scrub that used to make up the land usage of the valley floor has been bought up cheap and turned into suburbs. A lot of the hills have been concreted and paved so runoff is quick there too. Then the water has nowhere to soak in slowly on the way to the river so you get these higher peak flash flooding events. Awareness of these issues is growing but a solution requires an ambitious combined effort from multiple levels of government and for the people of Nepal to respect their government. Nepalese politicians are not ambitious and have done very little to earn this respect in most peoples' lifetimes.
The plus side is that the Nepalese people are very tough. Crises are common as a geographic, economic and political reality in Nepal and there is some level of psychological and systemic adaptation that is forced to take place. While they do push towards development there is usually one foot left in the past- in older, more resilient ways of living that they can fall back too in times of crisis and hardship. In Australia if the country ran out of fuel for an extended period of time it would probably be the end of the nation as we know it. I was there when Nepal faced a trade blockade and ran out of petrol (and other imports) for months- families already lived together so nobody was isolated. Farms relied more on animals to pull loads. Nepal's food is mostly locally made and many suburban houses have very solid gardens, chickens, goats and even cows. It was not easy though and hospitals in particular were pushed beyond breaking point, struggling to provide medicine and keep generators running for crucial machines during brownouts.
It's not that the events that impact the nepalese people are less awful. But their systems and ways of living allow them to withstand them better than others would.
Take care,
Andrew and the team at Kailash.