I can understand that this is not the exact location where the floods actually happened. But I am sad and I am frustrated and I am angry.
We had floods in Sikkim, which is practically a "stone throw" away from a world-level map point of view. I was there then. There was past research but everyone was so surprised. Activists talking about that event 10 years prior. Published reports.
Yet, we do nothing to move people away. To pause and think what the hell is going wrong. Just keep hustling and pretend shit is not going to go wrong. I am tired of our* culture.
our: all of us, I am not only talking about India, Nepal or China here.
pmkary
I'm from Iran and sadly it is the same here as well. Our country is in a bad shape given the political/economic situation and there are so many warnings that are common knowledge, but given the economy of fixing them, nothing really happens to prevent them. We had a mall that was decades too old and very unstable. The fire department had issued many safety warnings and had tried to close the place for safety; it did not happen and the building went on fire and crashed to the ground, killing many civilians and firefighters. Its a shame things like this happen; made me incredibly sad to see this report. Hope nothing like this ever happens to anyone.
fedeb95
This happens nearly every year in Italy.
Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
I don't know if it is true, but by today still voting for parties denying climate change all the way and that have done nothing in past years to prevent this type of risks is crazy.
embedding-shape
> Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
I have a tiny lithium battery on a desk in my lab that started swelling about a week ago. I've been meaning to go to the recycle place every day since then to drop it off, but nothing exploded yet, so here I sit with a slightly swollen battery some meters away from me.
I'd say you're just about right :)
hylaride
If you have an oven light or a resister, you can use it to almost fully discharge the Lipo battery. Doing that will mostly render it inert, but if it's already swollen, you'll want to do it in a metal bucket/container outside. It can take awhile depending on the capacity of the battery. (This is how I dispose my FPV drone batteries).
V__
Fingers crossed it doesn't burn your house down when your out and about. At least put it somewhere outside.
embedding-shape
I have plenty of fire alarms, both local and remote, and extinguishers of different types around, I'm not too worried :) But thanks for the concern kind stranger!
Epa095
At least put it in a coffee cup or something like that!
toss1
YES!!
The other thing to do is discharge it, so it has little energy stored to maintain/enlarge a fire
A drone engineer I worked with would immediately put any suspect battery into a barrel of water for several days, then get them disposed of properly.
The risk really seems trivial, probably because of our extensive experience with ordinary alkaline and NiCad batteries with a very benign degradation pattern, but the risk with Li-Ion is no joke.
All your fire extinguishers will do you no good if it goes off while you are out of the house. Also, the fire extinguishers will only suppress the surrounding fire, and do nothing about the core Li-Ion fire itself.
jacquesm
It's trivial until they go, and then it is instant misery. I've done it on purpose just to see how bad it would be and even knowing it will happen it will still surprise you with how sudden, total and hot those things burn. You have < 2 seconds from first signs of ignition to all-out fire with the battery moving all over the place due to outgassing. It's a thing to behold.
embedding-shape
How am I supposed to be able to observe it slowly swell more over time then? I think I might have overstated how big this battery is, or understated how small it is. It's fiiine :)
jacquesm
Your extinguisher will do absolutely nothing. Get rid of it. Soon. Better now.
embedding-shape
The extinguisher is not for the battery itself silly, it's for when everything else around it is on fire :)
boringg
But if the fire continues after the extinguisher is done… what is covering that scenario?
lazide
Lol, literally none of those will meaningfully reduce or
stop the damage if it happens.
Very applicable example for the thread!
Medox
PSA: check drawer with old devices regularly. Found a swollen battery in my PSP, after not touching it 7-8 years. Same with an old motorola A920 (quite old). Who knows how many years both had swollen batteries but, then again, newer batteries have much more power to contain.
WarmWash
If you think about it though, there are billions of shoddily made lithium batteries sitting in drawers everywhere for years now, and yet there are only about 10 fire incidents a day.
So like many other boogeymen, driving to work is still far more dangerous. Back of the napkin shows about 100x more likely to die in a car crash than experience a battery incident in any given year.
lazide
so far
DrBazza
People are good at reacting to a common danger. Look at the Boxing Day Tsunami - people standing and watching the sea as they just didn't know what it was as they had never seen it before.
This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine.
And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings.
Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.
ChrisMarshallNY
> typically not in our lifetime.
That's changing. Even though I'm 64, I suspect that I'll be seeing a lot of "not in my lifetime" stuff happening, before I pop my clogs.
DrBazza
You're a little bit older than me - and I recall reading that 'our era' is actually pretty unusual for how quiet it has been in terms of natural disasters and their magnitudes.
Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883
Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960
and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.
phtrivier
It must be hard to discuss that in Italy, where millions of tourist (like me) queue to visit Pompei (or, better in my opinion, Herculanum), and then go back to their AirBnB in... Napoli, aka the backyard of an active volcano.
As a friend says, "Our collective cognitive dissonance is something I would not want to climb with a bike."
brabel
It’s very different to visit a risk area as a tourist. Your chances of being buried are slim for a particle week. But for the people living there every day, the statistics compound. For a long enough period it’s almost guaranteed you will suffer. In the case of the downhill villages in Nepal, everyone knew those lakes would eventually burst , and in a matter of a few years. To continue building and living in those areas was completely reckless and I want to believe that anywhere in Europe they would have evacuated such villages decades before disaster.
eliaspro
In Germany we just rebuild everything in an area (Ahrtal) devastated by one of the worst floods in local history...
chinathrow
By the amount of (some of it useless) tech we've come to build in the last 3 decades, we should have arrived at the stage where we can collectively control the CO2 levels in our atmosphere, by now. For ever.
We failed.
sfn42
We can increase them, it's just really hard to decrease them which is why scientists have been telling us to stop increasing the CO2 levels for about a century.
srean
Indeed.
Cutting down on annual emissions will not be accompanied by reduction in atmospheric CO2, unless the current rate of emission is lower than that of natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, despite cuts, if the cuts at global scale are at all real.
wafflemaker
It's not hard, it just takes a lot of energy.
Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed.
Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.
sfn42
It does not just take a lot of energy. If we got unlimited free energy today it would take decades if not centuries to build enough carbon capture facilities to just remove as much CO2 as we're producing.
Of course the free energy would instantly allow us to eliminate a huge amount of emissions but that's not really relevant to the point. All the concrete for the tens of thousands of facilities would add up a good amount of additional CO2 to scrub as well.
lovich
There’s some projects trying to figure out carbon capture that’s net negative for co2 emissions like Vesta[1], but yea, we haven’t done nearly enough.
>Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
Humans are really good at stealing, lying, beating their wives and all sorts of other bad shit too but you don't see people going around saying "aw shucks, it's just nature, whatcha gonna do". One of the benefits of society is to tame human nature in such a way that we all benefit more than we lose and those benefits let us outcompete the adjacent society whether that's the cavemen or a nation state.
Whichever society figures out how to marginalize the voice of the unprincipled, the emotional, those who lie with plausible deniability for their own (often not even financial, just in their own damn head) self interest and overall detriment will mop the floor with the rest of them.
lazide
squints I mean, I’ve literally heard people do that for all of those things.
lazide
There is also an effect being caused by social media and video sharing - loss of context.
The entire Himalayan foothills area (which includes what, at least 6 different major countries off the top of my head) are potentially impacted by something like this.
Most of these areas are barely surviving, and extremely poor, and often very disconnected from the rest of the country due to the terrain.
Realistically, what do you think they could have done to prevent this, given the likely 1/1000 or lower chance it would happen to them specifically?
srean
> Realistically, what do you think they could have done to prevent this, given the likely 1/1000 or lower chance it would happen to them specifically?
Use science based zoning and not build or populate known hazardous areas.
vintermann
People live there already. How do you propose to move them and support them in the place you moved them to? Please don't make me break out the Aquaman joke.
srean
I am not talking to this specific case but about a general phenomenon that I see in my country, where people are being incentivized to build on hazardous areas by way of corruption.
Depending on the scale one could incentivized people to move to safer areas.
vintermann
The threat of death from flooding is already a pretty good incentive, people accept the risk when it's the best option they have.
srean
For some who are very poor yes I agree. But many are baited in by corrupt policies by a nexus of politicians and contractors/builders -- cheap land, cheap permits.
srean
Arggh! excuse my autocorrect induced typos.
incentivize.
talking about
user00005
> not build or populate known hazardous areas.
The ultra narrow valley surrounded by steep walls should set off one's self preservation senses.
It did when I saw the first video from this disaster. Normally you don't hang out too long in a couloir.
lazide
One way, or another, anyway.
lazide
What does that concretely actually mean?
There are only a handful of areas on the planet without known disaster exposure risk. Maybe zero, really.
srean
That's quite hyperbolic.
Zoning is not an all or nothing.
There is a lot of land that does not have such extreme dangers. Of course, some countries have it worse than others. Japan would be one such. Good or bad, the population has been on the decline there for unrelated reasons.
For earthquakes this is what my country looks like
This is at a very broad resolution. One can refine to make this more local. Earthquakes are just one type of hazard. One has to take other hazards into account.
newsclues
Your trying to control geography with policy.
But not considering why people build communities in valleys.
More geography and less policy knowledge is required
srean
That's not quite it. Its about policies that take into account the cost of future events and balance it against the ease of building. The future needs to be priced in, in today's prices.
Regulations (for example, you cannot build unless and insurer is willing to insure your property against known local hazards) and enforcing the regulations can make that happen. Often we move in the other direction by adopting policies that encourages mispricing.
lazide
Tell me you have zero idea about the region without telling me you have zero idea about the region.
Insurers? Building code enforcement? Are you for real?
Since you are making this personal I am not going to respond to you any further. Sorry.
lazide
You’re the one making it all or nothing. give some concrete examples to prove me wrong, or stop bs’ing.
don’t forget major earthquakes (most of California and the entire Pacific Rim, to name some well known areas), floods, serious droughts, tornados, hurricanes/cyclones, fires, subsidence (into the ocean or sinkholes), volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and lahars.
It’s about frequency and preparation, but it’s never perfectly safe. No building code handles everything, it’s impossible. Hazards are somewhat mitigated or ignored, not entirely dealt with.
srean
Not sure what you mean by give concrete examples, when my position is normative.
I am not sure where you are getting "all or nothing" in my comments. If you are interested, you can read my other comments on this story to get perhaps a fuller picture of my position.
I understand my comments have worked you up, but I am not sure why. If you have lost people in this incident, I am genuinely sorry for your loss and can understand emotional outbursts. If you have dear ones engaged in practices that I am disapproving of, well, then in that case too I can understand your displeasure.
If you thought that I am claiming that adhering to my position will ensure that future death tolls would magically become zero then that's uncharitable reading.
My position is quite simple, price in the hazards based on scientific hazard assessment. Enforce policies that encourages correct pricing, rather than part take in corrupt practices that encourages mispricing of the kind that benefits the political class and builder class nexus that operate from the safety of being out of range.
This can be done through regulations. For example, we have mandatory third party accident insurance for vehicles. That's an example of a regulation that encourages pricing in the hazards.
Hazard zoning is not all or nothing of the type (a) permitted and (b) not permitted. It is about assigning areas to different grades of quantized hazards. See my other comment for example of such zoning for Earthquake hazard.
With hazard priced in, the markets would mostly take care of where to build new homes and what kinds to build.
In Himalayan states of India we have the opposite going on. Politicians, in concert with the enforcement bodies that are peopled by their flunkies, encourage illegal constructions in known hazardous areas, deregulates zoning so that dangerous areas are cheaper to own property on in exchange of kickbacks from the builders.
> don’t forget major earthquakes ...
I am not forgetting that for sure but not sure what your point is. If it's -- look here are other dangerously built up areas in the US -- then yes I agree.
There was corruption involved in managing the levies that were supposed to protect New Orleans too.
> or stop bs’ing
And yes there is no need to be rude. It does not make your point stronger.
lazide
I’ve lived in India and spent quite a bit of time in the region. It’s hard to say how ridiculous this sounds considering that experience.
In theory? Sure.
In reality? Lulz
srean
You may have lived, in the past presumably.
On the otherhand I live here, with large part of my childhood in an earthquake hazard zone, the highest in fact. If you have lived here and know your high school geography you would be well equipped to guess where.
I am not sure I hear any constructive suggestions from you other than lulz. Unfortunately that's not going to make a difference.
In any case, since this has devolved into personal insults. I recuse myself from a wrestling bout in the mud, sorry about denying the pleasure.
lazide
So you know, and have no excuse. Care to name the insult?
mr_toad
And stop bailing out people who build in known danger areas where they can’t get insurance.
srean
For an idea about the rampant corruption in the Himalayan states of India that promotes illegal and dangerous real estate projects. There is a cartel of politicians and builders who are making a fast buck selling to those who are not fully aware of the magnitude of the dangers.
Even in the US you'll find states which ban the phrase "climate change" from state law, or scientific study of sea level rise. In regions profoundly at risk from both.
They (meaning not just US) are literally proving Upton Sinclair's law.
titzer
> I am tired of our* culture.
The way I justify it in my mind is that, by all accounts, there's never been a global civilization of any kind on this planet before. Especially not one with sentient primates connected by instant telecommunications and powered by capitalism. There is no existence proof that this can work. So when it seems like it is failing, I take solace in that maybe it's not even possible.
I'm really not sure if any combination of political and economic systems could have avoided the mess we find ourselves in. Capitalism and free enterprise powered by fossil fuels does seem like it strapped a booster rocket to our inherent greed and inability to live in balance with our surrounding ecosystems, and now we've got an unhealthy combination of massive momentum and no political will to redirect human development towards sustainability. It's going to be chaos because global civilization seems to be uncontrollable and voracious. So, buckle up?
shrubby
Yes.
Aleksey Yurchak coined a term Hupernormalisation and it works here too.
We know the reality, yet leaders keep telling us via TV, social media... that everything is fine.
We know that they know that we know.
Fake world? Matrix? Escape from the freedom?
Gravityloss
In a large part of the world, the people voted for those people.
It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments
jack_riminton
Reminds me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave
So I don't think it'a new thing, but maybe it's getting worse
Baudrillard restated, as a cause rather than an effect.
_bernd
I can highly recommend "the agony of the real" if you haven't read it yet :)
srean
> yet leaders keep telling us via TV, social media... that everything is fine.
How else will they make easy money from illegal and unsafe constructions.
There is always the "it was the will of god" excuse.
This will continue till we wisen up and elect the right people, select the right people.
DoctorOetker
> This will continue till we wisen up and elect the right people, select the right people.
This is part of the problem:
The problem is not necessarily democracy, but rather the insight the lack of bandwidth in voting ballots. A few bits every 4 years or whatever? Contrast this with the rate of modification in the law of a jurisdiction. Define the "democratic grade" as the ratio of binding democratic input in bits/per year to the changes in the binding law in bits/per year.
The problems aren't the concepts of democracy, but that humanity was sold a muzzle with a nameplate stating "democracy".
One may argue that it was necessary in the era where most democracies were initiated, until large enough fractions of the population become educated, but justified or not, its hard to defend today.
Every time you spread the message that we just need to "vote right" you too are in a novel way a part of the problem.
srean
I agree with your broad point. As I said in another comment, perhaps it is time to lean towards sortition. We need a better and faster feedback loop.
Low probability but high impact hazards, those are the toughest to deal with at society scale.
huurtehoog
There's no system that can compensate for what people think, want, and do.
We just need to be better. All anyone can do is be a bit better everyday. It's a monumental, hard task that we all just need to do.
This is how society gets better. We have come a long way. We have a long way to go. We can't "design" our way out of simply being better people.
DoctorOetker
I think you will find little support for your suggestion that when you huurtehoog give up on something, the whole world should also give up on it, without rigorous proof of the proclaimed hopelessness.
lynx97
Are there "right people"? Or does power corrupt, and your cozy wish is just not realistic? Looking at local politics, I see misuse of power and on all sides. Left, right, middle. Nobody can be trusted.
lbriner
I don't think it is necessarily corruption. That is an easy accusation to make but what actually happens when someone joins a government? You learn a whole tonne of stuff you didn't know about what is broken and need fixing and you learn about how much money you don't have to spend but you don't want the country to fall apart in depression but telling everyone they are screwed so you try and deflect as much as possible.
The other issue is that the machinery is not 1 person but 10s or 100s of 1000s of people who are actually doing the work you want to do. There is a difference between "£10M will sort out that hospital easily" and going through the machine ends up making that cost more like £100M not just "corruption" although there will be some but also massive inefficiency, lack of agency for people to make things happen without having 100 meetings to agree it and then having the government change their mind and throw the whole thing in the trash.
Devolving decisions to local government helps to a point but some things have to be managed centrally, which is where the bureaucracy is at its worst.
srean
That's a damn good question.
My hunch is there are honest and reasonably competent people but who don't desire such positions.
Perhaps it is time to try sortition at scale.
shrubby
Valid point!
I was just a while ago writing elsewhere (sorry, not totally on topic):
"But now almost everyone has figured out what the signs of the corruption are so we can spot the ones getting ill from the power and remove them.
I was joking that we (Finland) could sacrifice a island f Åland to be a Matrix for the power corrupted elite. We can simulate plenty of virtual sycophants fro them to be perfectly happy narcissists while isolated from doing us harm.
And I'm happy to volunteer to train as a therapist, should someone want to get better!
The golden rule and its formulations is pretty damn good litmus test for checking the level of corruption. If you're deep enough this will create a rage reaction. Think of Trump when someone talks about empathy or standard deviation. He will get hostile as he doesn't understand what the aliens around him are talking about.
I referred to the moral development with the lollipop and the levels are:
Pre-conventional (narcissist level in childhood or later in life regression by trauma, addiction or ...)
Conventional (the sheep level that understands moral based on what others do around - google banality of evil if you don't know this)
Post-conventional is the level where we do the golden rule thinking.
Most of us are in the conventional in action, BUT can understand the golden rule and that's enough. Have the decision makers reflect on some, even mundane, issues on the basis of "what if all 8 billion of us did this" and you'll get a short sircuit or division by zero, if the capability has regressed or never developed. These are no evil people by no means, but in most cases ones that have not had a healthy people around them. Either as a child or later on. We just know where we're going to end up should we not remove them from the power. Whether the society is powered by communism, or capitalism, or whateverism the outcome is the same if we don't figure out a way for this.
We cannot allow replacement via "good great leaders" as the power itself also creates the regression, just like addiction or trauma. So if I'm seemingly moral now and you'll select me as the great spagetti leader that dictates over the world and other puny religions, eventually I will corrupt by the admiration. And so will you.
The predicament of the human race is IMO decided by the fact that do we dare to start talking about this human trait honestly :D Sorry a long rant, now I'll shut up!"
So thanks for a question I had an answer almost available!
kijashdkujdfhas
> I was joking that we (Finland) could sacrifice a island f Åland to be a Matrix for the power corrupted elite.
"Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
And build them a home, a little place of their own
The Fletcher Memorial Home
For Incurable Tyrants and Kings"
...
"They can polish their medals and sharpen their smiles,
And abuse themselves playing games for a while
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead"
-- "The Fletcher Memorial Home" by Pink Floyd
srean
I feel bad for Roger Waters now. He seems to be a sad old solitary man shouting at the clouds, though I mostly agree with him.
My disagreements are about how he treated the band.
gonzalohm
Same approach that we are taking against climate change
srean
We do the opposite. The political class and the contractor class regularly flout safety norms and build where they shouldn't. They make the money from the safety of being out of range.
When the political class are questioned they utter inanities like people should be grateful that God Ganga maia waters have come to bless their lands and homes.
It is a racket. This will continue till we start electing people who respect the scientific methods and their conclusions.
repelsteeltje
Okay, but isn't it likely that the outcome of those scientific investigations will be that the Himalayan foothills should not be inhabited at all, except maybe a couple of places? What I mean is: Sure, politicians and contractors could do better, but I believe the primary reason for villages and bridges in those valleys is that people want them there. Standard of living is exceptionally low and this is just one of many hazards.
srean
> Okay, but isn't it likely that the outcome of those scientific investigations will be that the Himalayan foothills should not be inhabited at all, except maybe a couple of places
Yes and that is broadly the safe option. One can build on geological stable high grounds. They are rather and more difficult to build on. We know what happens when we don't.
> Sure, politicians and contractors could do better
It's not mistake of the "oops a typo" variety.
They are knowingly making a freakton of money by endangering the people who ought to know better. I agree sometimes the poor might not have viable alternatives that they can fund with their own bank balance but it seems this is where the governments should step in to fund alternatives. But why do that when there is easy money to be made.
repelsteeltje
While I usually prefer to attribute incompetence rather than malice, it's hard to deny corruption is a likely factor here too. But the "freakton of money" aspect IMO needs nuance. I wager that the wealth of those cronies doesn't come close to my western living standards, so who am I to judge?
srean
I am not knowledgeable about Nepal so I wouldn't know what role corruption played in this particular case.
Nepal is literally between rock and a hard place. But in my country, India, there is plenty of this kind of corruption going on.
EDIT:
> I wager that the wealth of those cronies doesn't come close to my western living standards, so who am I to judge?
They are in no way implicated in this particular case but corruption in India can pay very handsomely
Why humans settle in valleys? Is a question you should ask
srean
Not all valleys are equally dangerous.
The question is why people build new on known dangerous places. The new is an important word. They do because the future is not priced in (make insurance mandatory?) and because of acts of corruption that actively promote/incentivize development in hazardous areas by rewriting zoning, repricing permits, rewriting saner policies.
pmontra
Some people's job is building new houses to sell them. Your question is why they are allowed to build in some areas. Usually there is no point working unless it's for money so take your guess.
BTW, I can't build anything in half of my garden unless I also build huge concrete structures to anchor the terrain, which maybe would make matters worse. My house has been there for about 100 years, the other houses too, maybe it's stable enough but often they allow what's already there and deny anything new. Anyway, it's fine, I don't want to build something there.
srean
> Your question is why they are allowed to build in some areas
No that is not my question at all. In fact I don't have a question, I have a position.
My position is that population density in many of these super dangerous areas is because of corruption laced government policies and practices. The government follows these policies in concert with builders because they can knowingly profit from endangering people (i) in dire straits, (ii) people who are not informed about magnitude of the risks.
In addition to that their corrupt practices distort the market prices so that people end up suckered. If these corrupt practices were to stop or reduce and better more people friendly policies were followed then these place will not become uninhabited but plausible less populated. If you look at my other comments on this story you will get more details of my position.
Some people are in such dire straits that they may still agree to stay in a hazard equivalent to living on Chernobyl lands. Some who are more fortunate would take other options should the government be doing their job.
newsclues
Have you ever been in a river valley in a mountainous region?
Hard to build on the mountain, and the valley has transportation, easier to build, fertile land, food and water.
It’s very obvious why humans settle where they do (despite the risks).
srean
> Have you ever been in a river valley in a mountainous region?
Brought up there.
pmontra
And all the good places have been taken centuries ago.
cucumber3732842
And most of this "well obviously nobody should build anywhere where there will be serious destruction every couple generations" type sentiment ultimately just to funnels wealth and power to whoever took that good land previously.
cucumber3732842
>. The political class and the contractor class.
But these people who want to make a buck building garbage somewhere it won't last are largely counterbalanced by the equal and opposite people who seek to financially benefit at society's expense by harnessing the screeching of the useful idiots to get sprinkler systems mandated in garden sheds and mail order carports require engineered plans.
They're basically two sides of the same "slimy people who'll lie for a buck" coin.
srean
Maybe true in the first world. In 3rd world countries some times the information about the hazards is not properly appreciated.
For example, there were recent floods, is a location were previous governments had not developed. Now the current government rather than taking accountability are claiming that affected houses should be grateful that they have been touched by the river god.
Difficult to believe, but some people fall for the propaganda.
“the people”, those instinct-driven will-less victims of the “Epstein class”, right?
Why do they have to be “moved”? They are perfectly capable of moving themselves as I can attest to seeing them flooding into my country by the thousands. “The people” make their own choices.
madaxe_again
The debris flow that has just happened doesn’t appear to be a glacial outburst.
Rather, the entire front face of a glacier at high elevation sheared off, likely millions of tonnes of material at least, crashed down a steep runnel, slammed into the opposing slope on the other side of the valley at the bottom, made that partially collapse, dammed the river for several minutes, and then all descended at high speed as the dam failed, with the results we see.
Some reportage is still saying there was an earthquake - there wasn’t - the landslide itself was the source of the seismic waves.
Brilliant analysis! Although china is notoriously bad at reporting earthquake data, I assumed in this case they were open and honest. It made sense that an earthquake would trigger this event. I do not fault anyone for interpreting the data this way. The USGS has been the agency I most trust in the federal government.
USGS is a fact finding organization. They do not regulate. They have been around since 1879. The land surveys they have done made huge impact on society. The reliability of surveys that they have facilitated has made an impact on industrial civilization that few will understand or ever hear about.
trompetenaccoun
>simulated worst-case outburst events from these lakes both in the Tibetan town of Nyalam and downstream at the border with Nepal
For context that's not where the flood happened, there's a massive mountain range in between those vallies reaching over 8000m (Shishapangma).
In earth science there are thousands of worst case scenario models published, but it's hard to actually predict reality.
yccs27
It's just the opposite side of the same mountain, used as a case study for modeling GLOF risk. In fact, they prominently cite "Potentially dangerous glacial lakes across the Tibetan Plateau" [1], which includes Gyirong Port and the downstream valley as a high risk of GLOFs and notes that many buildings there are exposed to potential flash flooding. Take a look at Fig. 5 [2] - the upper left cluster of dangerous lakes and exposed buildings is the site of the disaster. They also name Jilong, Nyalam, Dingri and Kangding as the Tibetan counties with the highest lake danger; the glacier collapse happened at the border of Jilong county.
Not in all potential areas across such rough terrain.
21asdffdsa12
Its a "detect characteristic vibrations" - send to starlink? or if thats the problem- use the river itself and transmit the warning with the speed of sound through water.. by just having some underwater bell upstream. Go full lowtech, but at the risk of no warning if the river is dry at glacier dam break.
trompetenaccoun
There are definitely countries that have very good warning systems. Japan comes to mind. As for Nepal I wouldn't expect it though, and even in China devastating flood events happen regularly in more populated areas than the Himalayas, where people could have been saved if they'd been warned. Despite China's excellent mobile coverage, that doesn't seem to be the issue.
ip26
Clearly the point of this paper was not to flag a specific lake as being a specific problem. It seems pretty clear it's a case study meant to provide generalizable information and principals for remediation, and while they didn't predict the exact glacial lake that would collapse first, they were flagging danger in exactly the right region.
I don't think I've seen a snuff film of that scale before. I'm not good with even fictional horror. This may haunt my dreams. For most of the people there was just nothing they could do. But others would have had a chance if they had run perpendicular to the flow and climbed like their life depended on it. I'll try to remember that the next time I'm fleeing in panic from a flash flood.
Looks like a warning siren could have saved some lives. But apparently this was a black swan.
ANH
| But apparently this was a black swan.
What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.
throwup238
There have been maybe three such events in the 21st century (glacier or landslides producing more than a magnitude 5 quake), and none of them have happened in an area like the Himalayas. The other two were in Alaska on Mt Steller in 2005 and the Lamplugh Glacier in 2016, neither of which produced massive downstream floods.
It usually takes entire icebergs calving off to produce such seismic events and intense monsoons to create such flooding.
ElProlactin
> There have been maybe three such events in the 21st century
It seems that past history (especially recent) will not be a good predictor of future events.
throwup238
Spoiler alert: that’s the whole point of a black swan event.
ElProlactin
A black swan event is an event that is unpredictable because it is so rare.
While I'd wait for confirmation about the cause of this specific incident, the point you seem to be ignoring is that, due to climate change, events that would have been considered "black swans" historically will become more and more common, to the point that they are expected to occur.
throwup238
I think that’s a misreading of the entire book. A black swan event is a rare, high-impact outlier that is nearly impossible to predict under normal circumstances, but is rationalized as having been inevitable in hindsight.
ElProlactin
For whatever reason, you continue to try to ignore the point I'm making, which is that, in terms of natural disasters related to climate in particular, what would have been "rare, high-impact outlier[s]" are increasingly becoming common enough to be not rare and not outliers.
throwup238
And you continue to ignore what I said (and what the book said). The whole point of a black swan event is exactly what you just described.
It’s the inflection point when our priors change.
fc417fc802
Maybe I misunderstand (either you or the topic in general) but I don't think what you're saying is correct. A black swan event is (to my understanding) something unexpected and generally remains so. Not (as you seem to be suggesting) "oh hey that was historically unexpected but going forward it's now considered a standard contingency".
And I have no idea where you got the "rationalized as inevitable in hindsight" thing. I've never heard of that in relation to black swan events before.
gos9
Have you read the book?
crote
If events like these are "nearly impossible to predict", how come this post is linking to a scientific paper predicting exactly this scenario?
This flood is like The Big One in California. We know it is going to happen, it is virtually a certainty. The only question is when and where.
If glacial floods come as a surprise to you, it is only because you have been deliberately ignoring all the climate change warnings. So, a short recap: we'll see massive droughts, giant wildfires, huge floods due to rainfall, significantly more intense hurricanes, mass starvation due to large-scale crop failure, and low-lying countries drowning due to sea level rise. Oh, and add a high likelihood of the AMOC collapsing triggering a cooldown of the East Coast and Europe to the list.
snowwrestler
Black swans are actually fairly well-populated birds that are easy to spot. So as a metaphor it works well for a common thing that smug people of limited knowledge try to claim is rare and surprising.
dredmorbius
Anticipation is one thing, effective response in the seconds before disaster strikes is quite another thing. This might not have been an absolute black swan, but even with foresight it is challenging in the extreme to avoid risk.
I've been reviewing what coverage I can find of the present event in Nepal/China, in context with Section 5.1, "Comprehensive approach to disaster risk management", of TFA.
It seems that what would be required would be:
- Active surveillance of glacial lake formation.
- Active mitigation of glacial lakes, reducing risk.
- Warning and response infrastructure, procedures, and protocols along the likly flood path.
From video of what I presume are among the worst-hit areas (see: <https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>), there appear to have been at best a few seconds of warning. Very robust structures are demolished virtually instantly. Even had people been sheltering within those structures, or headed up-slope above the water flow, either structural integrity would prove insufficient, or response time inadequate to reach a safe elevation above the debris flow. The latter problem is compounded by what appears to be an extraordinarily strong air blast (likely hurricane-strength or greater) as well as massive amounts of airborne debris, much of it rock.
Terrain is severely constrained in the region, and the only buildable regions are in river valleys themselves. The Gyirong Port border crossing is located deep within a river channel, and despite robust construction simply could not survive the event.
(Take a few minutes to examine the region around the port itself ... there are several communities and businesses all well within the disaster zone, and I suspect that obliteration to those matches or exceeds what was captured on video at the crossing itself.)
From the first video at this Twitter post, a camera situated roughly 20m above the base terrain did not survive the event (though it transmitted for roughly a minute).
A second camera (I believe near the same location) shows similarly catastrophic damage, and no chance for anyone at base level to climb to a safe elevation before being overtaken by the debris flow.
Climbing that far would require 4--8 minutes for even a highly-fit person. Available response time in the videos I've seen is on the order of 1--2 minutes. Anyone beginning within the debris zone is already walking dead.
As the Cowboy Junkies said:
But if there's on thing in my life
That these years have taught
It's that you can always see it coming
But you can never stop it
Anticipation isn't sufficient. Other than entirely abandoning such locations during all periods of high risk, loss of life is likely, and catastrophic property and infrastructure damage inevitable.
When I was researching this morning I found papers related to this kind of risk from at least 2000. Given 20 years there could have been things done I think. And there is a lot of settlement on the tops of the ranges in that area too.. Maybe the roads have to be on the river valley, but not everything else. People living there could have been offered alternative land to move out of the path of it.. monitoring and early warning could have been set up.. at the checkpoint, if it had to be there, there could have been a big evacuation tunnel carved into the hillside, or something.. I guess Nepal doesn't have a lot of resources though.
The same thing even happened a year ago in the sample place, but at a smaller size
https://www.stimson.org/2025/investigating-an-emerging-clima...
dredmorbius
So, one of the most notably impacted locations to date has been the Gyirong port border crossing, noted in a couple of my earlier comments. Part of that is due to there being surveillance closed-circuit camera footage available, and there are other areas which would have been similarly affected. A few additional thoughts and facts have come to light:
- The crossing was substantially renovated in January of this year following an earlier flood which washed out the bridge connecting the station (in China) to Nepal.
- The crossing, part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative>), by needs must sit on the principal highway through the region. Which ... follows the river valley. Now, it's possible for that highway to be raised substantially off the valley floor, but consider that "inundations reached heights of 800m (2,600 ft) in a valley some 7km (4.3 mi) from the origin" (<https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260827_22/>, via Wikipedia).
- The inundation reached the Gyirong port seven minutes after the initial avalanche. Even with absolutely timely warnings, that is only just barely enough time for a fit person to reach a safe elevation above the port itself. Wikipedia now mentions two people (of apparently hundreds present) being rescued from Gyirong port.
- Early reconnaissance footage above the site of the former Gyirong port shows nothing but bare land. All of the apparently quite substantial structures on the site were simply scrubbed from existence. The forces involved are formidable. <https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1369215.shtml>
- The event is, as has been noted, foreseable, but also unprecedented. There are no events of comparable magnitude in the area, despite previous flooding. The likelihood that this week's incident represents a potential new baseline must be considered.
- Debris flows were moving at roughly 50m/s, or 180 kph (about 110 mph). That's not only an absolutely formidable speed, but a formidable force, where kinetic energy = mass * velocity squared.
The only possible safe refuge I could see would be some sort of underground bunker, into which all staff and travelers would have to locate to in a matter of seconds, and then sealed against water intake, this in a busy border crossing with multiple nationalities and languages in a region with a < 70% literacy rate.
And that's for the Gyirong border station itself. Note that that was a Chinese facility, where China is the vastly wealthier and better-resourced partner to Nepal. Nepal's capabilities to effect similar measures at an equivalent facility or in numerous communities throughout the region is quite limited.
Also affected were numerous other facilities, including a shrine (being visited by numerous Hindu pilgrims), apparently utterly destroyed and all present killed, numerous villages, etc. Roads are heavily damaged if present at all, bridges are washed away, and in a region with tens to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants (based on various county/district Wikipedia pages I've examined), a dozen or so rescue helicopters have so far been summoned.
Flat lowland is great because it's cheap and easy to build on, and not a hassle to actually use.
Ridgelines and slopes are terrible to build on (and often use) because there is little to no actual flat usable area without extensive construction. They also tend to be unstable and slide/erode.
That said, if I was in that area, of course i'd never build/live on anything but the highest ridgeline or slope around.
One of those 'long term/outlier risks cause daily costs' type of things. :s
ghastmaster
Perpendicular is not the scientifically best path. 45 degree angle is the best angle if the threat is moving toward you at the same velocity that you can move. As the velocity of the threat increases, the angle gets closer to perpendicular. The size of the threat and distance of course matter as well. I think about this before tree felling. In chainsaw classes they teach you to move at a 45.
Reason077
Looking at the footage, the water/avalanche was moving far faster than anyone could move on foot. Well over 100 km/h, I would estimate.
dgellow
And taking the entire infrastructure with it, including buildings and roads
dredmorbius
Scrubbed bare from what I've seen to date of post-incident footage, though that's still preliminary.
dreamcompiler
Likewise if your car stalls on a railroad crossing, run at a 45 degree angle toward the train. This puts you away from the path of flying debris.
colechristensen
The great flood myths across the world are quite possibly ancestral memories of this kind of flood on a continental scale. Retreating ice age glaciers would make lakes the size of states held at bay by an impromptu dam of various kinds of debris (or more glacier) which then would break dumping great lake amounts of water hundreds of miles into the ocean within days. This kind of thing probably happened in lots of places.
delichon
You just pushed me into a rabbit hole called the Zanclean megaflood.
It is supposed that such an event happened, when the land between continental Europe and England got flooded. This was as well during a warmer period when glacier melted. And there was human population on that land.
Oh there's geological evidence of these things happening in the pacific northwest, the waves and water scouring the landscape in an unimaginable fashion left evidence to be seen today. Like 1000 Niagra falls for a month straight. Outflows measured in billions of gallons per second or 10+ cubic kilometers per hour.
Yes this is exactly the kind of thing i'm talking about and in the time frame which is at least plausible to make its way through mythology to modern day (not so much for the flooding of a dry mediterranean sea five million years ago)
dredmorbius
The flooding of the Black Sea, OTOH, might have played a part in the Flood Myth, having occurred around 7,600 years ago (5600 BCE):
- The site captured in the video, the Gyirong Port border crossing between China and Nepal, was struck by the flood roughly seven minutes after the presumed avalanche thought to have triggered the event.
- Flood inundation is seen up to 800 m (2,600 ft) above river level, and the camera position in the video at approximately 20--25m (roughly 6--8 stories) above ground level was engaged in the debris flow.
- It would take a fit person 4--8 minutes to climb even 250m or so above ground level, presuming instant notification and a clear evacuation path. Even with an instant warning of upstream conditions survival was overwhelmingly unlikely.
- Subsequent footage appears to show complete obliteration off all structures, with no trace remaining. This is based on preliminary imagery, without precise location information, and in a landscape changed beyond all recognition.
- Astoundingly, two survivors from the Port are mentioned in Wikipedia presently.
Though yes, one of the peculiarities of flood risk is that elevation equals safety. That's modulo a number of other factors though.
In particular, with an event of this magnitude, wind blast is a major effect. Toward the end of one video a line of buses in a car park is seen shifting backward, I suspect due to wind. These can reach well above hurricane force, and of course carries its own debris and threats, where even grass and straw can penetrate deeply. There's also the risk of secondary landslides and the like in steep terrain. One of the regions affected by this event has an etymology from "mud wall", which may be a reference to the geology of the canyon walls themselves. Those could easily be unstable.
Best option is to be lucky and not be there when things go horribly wrong.
scheme271
There was another similar flood on the same river about a year or two ago. The problem was the the glacial flooding started in Tibet and affected people just over the border (one of the videos is from the border crossing). There's no international data sharing for this sort of thing between China and Nepal and Nepal can't deploy sensors in Tibet to give sufficient warning.
markdown
I think the Japan tsunami videos showed as many, but it was spread out over the course of almost 2hrs and happened in slow motion over a large area. You could see some cars speeding to safety while others were washed away. Some stayed in taller structures assuming they were safe and were slowly washed away.
regularfry
I suspect you are dramatically overestimating how fast humans can climb. I hope I'm wrong.
suzzer99
I wonder if the river went dry first, like the water receding off into the horizon before a tsunami?
ghastmaster
It is possible if you consider madaxe_again's theory(comment here). If the debris just started descending without interruption, there would be no receding.
suzzer99
Well supposedly it was caused by a landslide blocking the river for a few minutes, then the dam burst all at once.
dredmorbius
Based on video footage which has emerged, no.
21asdffdsa12
We have tsunami warnings all the times now. Nobody is stopping people from burying sensor posts upstream.
alephnerd
It is harrowing. It also explains why the villages in my ancestral region in India (JK, HP, UK) with close cultural and ethnic ties with Nepal used to build them at the upper portions of the sides of mountains/hills and only shifted to building at the bottom of those kinds of valleys when motorized roads became a thing in the 20th century.
Rescue operations in Nepal are in good hands, but this is sadly because those same response orgs had to respond to a similarly brutal cloud burst floods back in 2013 [0], 2021 [1] and 2025 [2].
It also shows the very real and brutal effect climate change is already having, and will only get worse.
150 confirmed with 47 Americans? Surprising fraction. Mountaineers or that area is popular for some reason?
adelie
it's a popular area for tourists and mountaineers, but also i think it's a lot easier to estimate missing/dead tourists since most of them will be there with tours/companies that have to keep track of exactly where they are.
tppiotrowski
Syabru Besi is downriver of the border and the starting point for the Langtang valley trek which is probably the third most popular trekking location in Nepal (behind Everest basecamp and Annapurna circuit). I think the tourist data they have is from tourists that are traveling with guides but from my experience many tourists also bypass the official requirements and trek solo so the number could be much higher if the Langtang is affected.
keyle
Likely the tourists are better accounted for than the locals. Numbers are likely much higher :(
don_esteban
This.
You could probably count 100+ people in the death zone of the border crossing video alone. The final death toll will be terrible, with most never found.
janhaa
i understand it as 150 dead, with more people missing, of which 47 are americans.
suzzer99
I feel like I've easily seen more than that get swept away in videos.
lazide
Zero chance the actual death count is sub-1000
segmondy
Way too early to get an accurate count
markus_zhang
Nepal is popular for Westerners I think. Maybe for religious reasons?
porridgeraisin
Mountaineering.
For indians, you also have the religious aspect because the immigration center you go to to visit Mt Kailash is there.
That immigration building was the white one that got completely shredded in the popular video going around.
markus_zhang
Ah thanks for clarification.
markus_zhang
I have watched a few and they look like the four horsemen TBH.
inasio
Reminded me of the Huascaran avalanche (1970, killed approx 30K people) [0]. I'm surprised this is not also in the thousands of casualties (perhaps it'll get there) [0]
Near Juneau, Alaska, USA, the Mendenhall glacier has repeatedly, over the last few years, had a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood. Not nearly as catastrophic as the one in Nepal but it did flood areas near Mendenhall River in Juneau. The latest event was August 13, 2026.
The Scablands were terraformed by a series of GLOFs (Glacial lake outburst flood) like this when deglaciation started at the end of the last ice age. Just imagine it on a thousand times bigger scale
>During the last deglaciation that followed the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, geologists estimate that a cycle of flooding and reformation of the lake lasted an average of 55 years and that the floods occurred dozens of times over the 2,000 years between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago. U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jim O'Connor and Spain's Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales scientist Gerardo Benito have found evidence of at least twenty-five massive floods, the largest discharging about 10 cubic kilometers per hour (2.7 million m³/s, 13 times that of the Amazon River).
Also it's interesting if you start reading about Native American flood stories, these were not just tales or legends but telling actual historic events that the ancestors experienced.
There is some footage on youtube[0] that provides an aerial view and some perspective on the scale of this thing.
From rock climbing, I have a sense of erosion features and their scale. Turbulent flow can carve out huecos in sandstone. They look like someone used a 2ft ice cream scooper on the rock.
Now trying to scale up that model to the size of scablands is hard to wrap my head around.
This is one of the few interesting things I've learn from the rogan podcast.
exceptionaly brutal cctv footage from the tibet/nepal border, so many people that there is a tiny chance that perhaps one of them was tossed clear, but of the rest there will be no remains.
other videos shows that the flood "water" is so thick with mud that it is sheering off in sheets and one more shows it ripping out a concrete bridge that then floats away on top.
*disturbing video
Otherwise China report 3 dead and 558 missing, not clear if at the port itself or the surrounding county, or how accurate counts of those present at the port might be.
I remember in Africa, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, being taught in social studies, that Ethiopia was at risk for famine. They discussed that many farmers raised sheep and goats, which have a drastically different impact on the environment, than cattle (it has to do with how they eat grass -they pull it out by the roots, while cattle clip it).
Not long after that, Ethiopia was in the news for... anyone?
Lots and lots of ignoring scientists. Nothing new here.
Cassandra
qsera
>Lots and lots of ignoring scientists.
But do you have a statistics on how often these predictions are wrong?
ChrisMarshallNY
No. Please provide them.
ChrisMarshallNY
Heh. Just to explain.
I mentioned a personal anecdote, and a personal observation that things people think are new; are not, in fact, new. Us old people do that a lot. We've seen a lot of stuff.
The usual HN rude demand for "statistics," which almost certainly exist; both pro and con my observation, was made. Basically "Do a whole lot of work I don't feel like doing, and if you don't, you're wrong! (Nyah-Nyah)"
I said no. You show me yours (I know they can, if they look). It was a casual statement, on my part, and I really don't care about being right. It's not worth it, to me. If someone else has something to prove, go for it. I won't defend my position. I left (dropped out of, actually) High School, a long time ago, and what other people think of me, doesn't really drive me, anymore. I'll happily cede the point. If I decide they're right, I may even admit it.
In any case, exchanges like this get quite amusing.
qsera
That burden is on you since you placed a blame on the people "ignoring" the scientists. You should have understood how reliable these warnings are before blaming people for ignoring them...
Since you don't have them, I have to suppose you just like being on a high horse...
ChrisMarshallNY
Go for it.
I’m not losing any sleep over it.
Have a great day!
qsera
You too!
gizajob
This isn’t to refute your point… but do you also remember when scientists in the 1970s were panicking about global cooling and an impending ice age?
defrost
"As reported in the press" - yes.
"As placed in the press by the same think tanks upselling tobacco" - yes.
Paid for and spun as media confusion by powerful oil and resource extractors, such as but not limited to the Koch brothers, yes.
As a reaction to the late 1960 papers on CO2 impacts being taken seriously by world forums - yes.
But an actual significant number of atmospheric scientists and global modellers "panicking" about glacial expansion of the ice age we're currently in (you know, an ice age being any era during which ice covers the poles) ... uhhh, no.
Mainly as that didn't happen.
p_j_w
This is a common misrepresentation that deniers use to rationalize their unscientific position. The vast majority of the science, even in the 70s, stated that global warming was our future, not global cooling.
samirillian
Source?
I remember them referencing global cooling on science Friday on NPR as late as 2005
Symbiote
Some scientists, amplified by journalists. Other scientists at the time were predicting warming.
They were in a sense correct, because the aerosol cooling they were worried about did in fact (and continues to) have a fairly significant cooling effect... one that is offsetting the rapid warming that CO2 is causing presently.
berofeev
Media outlets were driving panic. Scientists were always saying warming is a problem
Actual cooling was from industrial emissions, but that was over by the 1970s. It being something to panic about at that point was a media amplification or a contrarian position, precisely because it was contrarian, not representative of scientific opinion at the time.
alkonaut
Is it possible to avoid these risks in mountainous areas? How many people are living in valleys downstream from lakes with these risks?
If one simply concluded that with current climate changes, it's not safe for humans to live under that risk, how many villages and cities would find themselves uninhabitable all of a sudden?
dredmorbius
Not readily.
The events, even with increased frequency, are relatively rare (perhaps a few times a decade), quite sudden, utterly overwhelming, and destructive to virtually everything in their path.
The only assured safety practice would be to keep out of the danger zone entirely, and even this is challenging:
- There's very little habitable or arable land, and much of that is in river valleys (e.g., in the heart of the risk zone).
- Many mountainous regions are poor, and Nepal particularly so. Governmental and institutional resources are highly constrained, corruption, opportunism, and risk-taking behaviours are common.
- It's not possible to construct around the risks, as even the most robust structures are utterly demolished. Post-incident imagery shows bare land scrubbed clean near Gyirong Port, for example. Underground shelter might be possible. But ...
- Response times are on the order of seconds to minutes. The elapsed time from the glacial collapse (captured by seismometers) to the debris wall striking Gyirong Port was roughly seven minutes. That's about as much time as would be necessary to climb to a safe(r) elevation or enter an underground shelter. Even then, survivors would have to wait to be dug out, potentially days or weeks later.
- Flood run-ups of as high as 800m (2,6000 ft) were reported within 7-8 km of the start of the incident. Even further down the river valley flood depths hit 9m (27 ft) within 30 minutes. Depending on local topography it would be necessary to move a considerable horizontal distance to reach a safe vertical elevation. Though there's an inverse relation between narrowness of a channel and the direct kinetic risk, in the case of this event, even a fairly broad floodplain would have presented considerable risk, and refuge structures would have to be exceptionally robust to survive and provide protection.
Monitoring of potential risks, advanced warning (that is, of a potential situation rather than a current one), and evacuation of the affected area would be necessary.
Anything constructed within the risk area would have to be seen as a sacrifice zone. Ironically the Gyirong Port was substantially rebuilt this past January following similar, though lesser floods about a year ago which wiped out the Friendship Bridge between China and Nepal. Infrastructure such as roads and bridges might be elevated above river level, but would otherwise have to be rebuilt following events.
Advance warnings are disruptive and often turn out not to reflect a manifest threat. With time, public and business response tends to be to deprecate and ignore such warnings. The region has a literacy rate below 70%, as well as being both an international trade route and tourist region, further complicating communications, awareness, and compliance with emergency preparation and response efforts.
This isn't to say that nothing can be done, but there are no easy choices, and local poverty will make even modest efforts challenging.
It would have been more apt if his name was Sirius.
Sadly it's not uncommon to see teenage and young men groups to seek out puppies and pregnant strays to stone to death in Himachal and Uttarakhand (two states in Himalayan India). Properly vaccinated they can be protectors.
mandeepj
In the future, don't go close to mountains during monsoon season - late May to August end; that period is specifically for Southeast Asia. For the rest of the world, you can find it out.
I read this wasn't due to rain but a glacial collapse. It sounds to me like the additional advice would be that due to a warming climate, avoid being under a glacier at all costs?
defrost
Down stream of a glacier, in the run off water shed.
As I've heard tell, this was a glacial collapse into and blocking a river, which then built up a head of pressure behind it, bursting to release a hammer blow of river water and debris that travelled a great distance.
Similar things can happen due to landslides into rivers; it depends on the topology of the land, here long narrow valleys carved out by heavy water flows.
The warning being, don't live in a natural "drainpipe".
In mountainous regions that's often not much of an option, there's a lot of vertical sides and valley bottoms.
jltsiren
The rivers in that area are pretty small. You would have to block them for days before there is a risk of a massive flash flood.
From what I've understood, the collapsing glacier either contained enough liquid water or melted enough from the impact that it continued flowing downstream. It covered ~20 horizontal kilometers in about 7 minutes before hitting the border crossing.
defrost
There's a few ways this could go and very likely no video feed to be sure.
It had the look of a large volume of water quickly released.
Massive tonnages breaking off of a glacier is still going to be mostly ice on impact .. there's a chance debris and ice chunks made a temporary dam as the bulk of the now shattered glacier ice released water putting pressure on that weak dam - leading to collapse and release.
dredmorbius
The specific geological cause is not yet clear.
We do know that a glacier substantially collapsed.
What contributed to the amount of water in the debris flow isn't clear. Speculation, from trained geologists, is that the friction of the glacier flow itself contributed to melt. I'm speculating that recent rains or higher temperatures might have contributed to melting on the glacier (and have seen some commentary speculating about this).
Speculating on my part: There might also have been accumulated water below the glacier, liberated by the ice flow, or perhaps groundwater which was evacuated along with other material. Events seem to have precipitated too quickly (roughly 7 minutes from galcial collapse to Gyirong Port inundation) for the collapse to have formed, then broken, a dam on tributary waterways upstream of the port.
GLOF is a recognised threat, but this event seems to have been at best only partially explained by that, and may be an entirely different mechanism. The follow-on studies should be fascinating, in the way that horrific disasters often are.
defrost
That all tracks - good additional comment.
> Speculation, from trained geologists
Probably about on par with speculation from trained geophysicists I'd warrant.
dredmorbius
Thanks.
Re "speculation, ...": my point being expertise, but based on background knowledge rather than close event-specific observations or measurements. Yes, geophysicists would be an equivalent level of expertise.
bamboozled
It sounds like there may have been some opportunity for warning then? If the thing was more of a "build up" ?
defrost
Sure, if every part of rugged terrain were monitored with sufficient frequency to detect such a change.
That might take some infrastructure to cover everywhere such things can happen (eg: the beds of rivers in Western Australia's Pilbara and Kimberley regions have a high flash flooding risk in the wet season.
bamboozled
Sounds like a great application for drone tech.
defrost
Is it?
What's the land area you'd like seamlessly and continuously monitored by a mobile object with moving parts ... and how is that a better solution than using static solar powered instrumentation?
mandeepj
Better suited for satellites
dredmorbius
Satellites or ground-based observation.
Geologists have used the latter for many decades. Monitors upslope of at-risk glaciers, solar/battery powered, and communicating by radio (or Internet / satellite links) could be part of this.
See for example the extensive seismic monitoring of California's San Andreas Fault, particularly at Parkfield and through the Carrizo Plain / CA Hwy 25.
(Different tech, obviously, but in situ ground-based sensors which share some similarities.)
defrost
Ground based field instrumentation on specific potential threats has the advantages of being up close and always on target whereas sat observation is distant and intermittent.
Multiple sat observations a day is great, obviously, but sudden collapses / changes often won't get flagged for seven or eight hours after the event.
We had floods in Sikkim, which is practically a "stone throw" away from a world-level map point of view. I was there then. There was past research but everyone was so surprised. Activists talking about that event 10 years prior. Published reports.
Yet, we do nothing to move people away. To pause and think what the hell is going wrong. Just keep hustling and pretend shit is not going to go wrong. I am tired of our* culture.
our: all of us, I am not only talking about India, Nepal or China here.
Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
I don't know if it is true, but by today still voting for parties denying climate change all the way and that have done nothing in past years to prevent this type of risks is crazy.
I have a tiny lithium battery on a desk in my lab that started swelling about a week ago. I've been meaning to go to the recycle place every day since then to drop it off, but nothing exploded yet, so here I sit with a slightly swollen battery some meters away from me.
I'd say you're just about right :)
The other thing to do is discharge it, so it has little energy stored to maintain/enlarge a fire
A drone engineer I worked with would immediately put any suspect battery into a barrel of water for several days, then get them disposed of properly.
The risk really seems trivial, probably because of our extensive experience with ordinary alkaline and NiCad batteries with a very benign degradation pattern, but the risk with Li-Ion is no joke.
All your fire extinguishers will do you no good if it goes off while you are out of the house. Also, the fire extinguishers will only suppress the surrounding fire, and do nothing about the core Li-Ion fire itself.
Very applicable example for the thread!
So like many other boogeymen, driving to work is still far more dangerous. Back of the napkin shows about 100x more likely to die in a car crash than experience a battery incident in any given year.
This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine.
And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings.
Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.
That's changing. Even though I'm 64, I suspect that I'll be seeing a lot of "not in my lifetime" stuff happening, before I pop my clogs.
Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883 Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960
and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.
As a friend says, "Our collective cognitive dissonance is something I would not want to climb with a bike."
We failed.
Cutting down on annual emissions will not be accompanied by reduction in atmospheric CO2, unless the current rate of emission is lower than that of natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, despite cuts, if the cuts at global scale are at all real.
Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed.
Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.
Of course the free energy would instantly allow us to eliminate a huge amount of emissions but that's not really relevant to the point. All the concrete for the tens of thousands of facilities would add up a good amount of additional CO2 to scrub as well.
[1] https://www.vesta.earth/science#Duck-Pilot
Humans are really good at stealing, lying, beating their wives and all sorts of other bad shit too but you don't see people going around saying "aw shucks, it's just nature, whatcha gonna do". One of the benefits of society is to tame human nature in such a way that we all benefit more than we lose and those benefits let us outcompete the adjacent society whether that's the cavemen or a nation state.
Whichever society figures out how to marginalize the voice of the unprincipled, the emotional, those who lie with plausible deniability for their own (often not even financial, just in their own damn head) self interest and overall detriment will mop the floor with the rest of them.
The entire Himalayan foothills area (which includes what, at least 6 different major countries off the top of my head) are potentially impacted by something like this.
Most of these areas are barely surviving, and extremely poor, and often very disconnected from the rest of the country due to the terrain.
Realistically, what do you think they could have done to prevent this, given the likely 1/1000 or lower chance it would happen to them specifically?
Use science based zoning and not build or populate known hazardous areas.
Depending on the scale one could incentivized people to move to safer areas.
incentivize.
talking about
The ultra narrow valley surrounded by steep walls should set off one's self preservation senses.
It did when I saw the first video from this disaster. Normally you don't hang out too long in a couloir.
There are only a handful of areas on the planet without known disaster exposure risk. Maybe zero, really.
Zoning is not an all or nothing.
There is a lot of land that does not have such extreme dangers. Of course, some countries have it worse than others. Japan would be one such. Good or bad, the population has been on the decline there for unrelated reasons.
For earthquakes this is what my country looks like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_zones_of_India
This is at a very broad resolution. One can refine to make this more local. Earthquakes are just one type of hazard. One has to take other hazards into account.
But not considering why people build communities in valleys.
More geography and less policy knowledge is required
Regulations (for example, you cannot build unless and insurer is willing to insure your property against known local hazards) and enforcing the regulations can make that happen. Often we move in the other direction by adopting policies that encourages mispricing.
Insurers? Building code enforcement? Are you for real?
Since you are making this personal I am not going to respond to you any further. Sorry.
don’t forget major earthquakes (most of California and the entire Pacific Rim, to name some well known areas), floods, serious droughts, tornados, hurricanes/cyclones, fires, subsidence (into the ocean or sinkholes), volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and lahars.
It’s about frequency and preparation, but it’s never perfectly safe. No building code handles everything, it’s impossible. Hazards are somewhat mitigated or ignored, not entirely dealt with.
I am not sure where you are getting "all or nothing" in my comments. If you are interested, you can read my other comments on this story to get perhaps a fuller picture of my position.
I understand my comments have worked you up, but I am not sure why. If you have lost people in this incident, I am genuinely sorry for your loss and can understand emotional outbursts. If you have dear ones engaged in practices that I am disapproving of, well, then in that case too I can understand your displeasure.
If you thought that I am claiming that adhering to my position will ensure that future death tolls would magically become zero then that's uncharitable reading.
My position is quite simple, price in the hazards based on scientific hazard assessment. Enforce policies that encourages correct pricing, rather than part take in corrupt practices that encourages mispricing of the kind that benefits the political class and builder class nexus that operate from the safety of being out of range.
This can be done through regulations. For example, we have mandatory third party accident insurance for vehicles. That's an example of a regulation that encourages pricing in the hazards.
Hazard zoning is not all or nothing of the type (a) permitted and (b) not permitted. It is about assigning areas to different grades of quantized hazards. See my other comment for example of such zoning for Earthquake hazard.
With hazard priced in, the markets would mostly take care of where to build new homes and what kinds to build.
In Himalayan states of India we have the opposite going on. Politicians, in concert with the enforcement bodies that are peopled by their flunkies, encourage illegal constructions in known hazardous areas, deregulates zoning so that dangerous areas are cheaper to own property on in exchange of kickbacks from the builders.
> don’t forget major earthquakes ...
I am not forgetting that for sure but not sure what your point is. If it's -- look here are other dangerously built up areas in the US -- then yes I agree.
There was corruption involved in managing the levies that were supposed to protect New Orleans too.
> or stop bs’ing
And yes there is no need to be rude. It does not make your point stronger.
In theory? Sure.
In reality? Lulz
On the otherhand I live here, with large part of my childhood in an earthquake hazard zone, the highest in fact. If you have lived here and know your high school geography you would be well equipped to guess where.
I am not sure I hear any constructive suggestions from you other than lulz. Unfortunately that's not going to make a difference.
In any case, since this has devolved into personal insults. I recuse myself from a wrestling bout in the mud, sorry about denying the pleasure.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/kiratpur...
https://citizenmatters.in/shimla-illegal-construction-urbani...
https://youtu.be/IcfbZgaUneQ
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/shimla/muck-in-rive...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/himachal-pradesh/supr...
"Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law" <https://www.npr.org/2024/05/17/1252012825/florida-gov-desant...> (2024)
"North Carolina Literally Passed Laws Against Science on Sea-Level Rises" <https://www.sciencealert.com/you-can-t-outlaw-hurricanes-how...> (2018)
The way I justify it in my mind is that, by all accounts, there's never been a global civilization of any kind on this planet before. Especially not one with sentient primates connected by instant telecommunications and powered by capitalism. There is no existence proof that this can work. So when it seems like it is failing, I take solace in that maybe it's not even possible.
I'm really not sure if any combination of political and economic systems could have avoided the mess we find ourselves in. Capitalism and free enterprise powered by fossil fuels does seem like it strapped a booster rocket to our inherent greed and inability to live in balance with our surrounding ecosystems, and now we've got an unhealthy combination of massive momentum and no political will to redirect human development towards sustainability. It's going to be chaos because global civilization seems to be uncontrollable and voracious. So, buckle up?
Aleksey Yurchak coined a term Hupernormalisation and it works here too.
We know the reality, yet leaders keep telling us via TV, social media... that everything is fine.
We know that they know that we know.
Fake world? Matrix? Escape from the freedom?
https://deming.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/inconvienent-t...
On the other hand, there's also a market for generating outrage and panic, sometimes justified, sometimes not.
So not the best metric for what majority of people want.
Also the wants are manufactured in many parts.
https://youtu.be/Gr7T07WfIhM
From wiki:
It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments
So I don't think it'a new thing, but maybe it's getting worse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
The century of the self must be recommended also.
How else will they make easy money from illegal and unsafe constructions.
There is always the "it was the will of god" excuse.
This will continue till we wisen up and elect the right people, select the right people.
This is part of the problem:
The problem is not necessarily democracy, but rather the insight the lack of bandwidth in voting ballots. A few bits every 4 years or whatever? Contrast this with the rate of modification in the law of a jurisdiction. Define the "democratic grade" as the ratio of binding democratic input in bits/per year to the changes in the binding law in bits/per year.
The problems aren't the concepts of democracy, but that humanity was sold a muzzle with a nameplate stating "democracy".
One may argue that it was necessary in the era where most democracies were initiated, until large enough fractions of the population become educated, but justified or not, its hard to defend today.
Every time you spread the message that we just need to "vote right" you too are in a novel way a part of the problem.
Low probability but high impact hazards, those are the toughest to deal with at society scale.
We just need to be better. All anyone can do is be a bit better everyday. It's a monumental, hard task that we all just need to do.
This is how society gets better. We have come a long way. We have a long way to go. We can't "design" our way out of simply being better people.
The other issue is that the machinery is not 1 person but 10s or 100s of 1000s of people who are actually doing the work you want to do. There is a difference between "£10M will sort out that hospital easily" and going through the machine ends up making that cost more like £100M not just "corruption" although there will be some but also massive inefficiency, lack of agency for people to make things happen without having 100 meetings to agree it and then having the government change their mind and throw the whole thing in the trash.
Devolving decisions to local government helps to a point but some things have to be managed centrally, which is where the bureaucracy is at its worst.
My hunch is there are honest and reasonably competent people but who don't desire such positions.
Perhaps it is time to try sortition at scale.
I was just a while ago writing elsewhere (sorry, not totally on topic):
"But now almost everyone has figured out what the signs of the corruption are so we can spot the ones getting ill from the power and remove them.
I was joking that we (Finland) could sacrifice a island f Åland to be a Matrix for the power corrupted elite. We can simulate plenty of virtual sycophants fro them to be perfectly happy narcissists while isolated from doing us harm.
And I'm happy to volunteer to train as a therapist, should someone want to get better!
The golden rule and its formulations is pretty damn good litmus test for checking the level of corruption. If you're deep enough this will create a rage reaction. Think of Trump when someone talks about empathy or standard deviation. He will get hostile as he doesn't understand what the aliens around him are talking about.
I referred to the moral development with the lollipop and the levels are:
Pre-conventional (narcissist level in childhood or later in life regression by trauma, addiction or ...) Conventional (the sheep level that understands moral based on what others do around - google banality of evil if you don't know this) Post-conventional is the level where we do the golden rule thinking.
Most of us are in the conventional in action, BUT can understand the golden rule and that's enough. Have the decision makers reflect on some, even mundane, issues on the basis of "what if all 8 billion of us did this" and you'll get a short sircuit or division by zero, if the capability has regressed or never developed. These are no evil people by no means, but in most cases ones that have not had a healthy people around them. Either as a child or later on. We just know where we're going to end up should we not remove them from the power. Whether the society is powered by communism, or capitalism, or whateverism the outcome is the same if we don't figure out a way for this.
We cannot allow replacement via "good great leaders" as the power itself also creates the regression, just like addiction or trauma. So if I'm seemingly moral now and you'll select me as the great spagetti leader that dictates over the world and other puny religions, eventually I will corrupt by the admiration. And so will you.
The predicament of the human race is IMO decided by the fact that do we dare to start talking about this human trait honestly :D Sorry a long rant, now I'll shut up!"
So thanks for a question I had an answer almost available!
"Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere And build them a home, a little place of their own The Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyrants and Kings" ... "They can polish their medals and sharpen their smiles, And abuse themselves playing games for a while Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead"
-- "The Fletcher Memorial Home" by Pink Floyd
My disagreements are about how he treated the band.
When the political class are questioned they utter inanities like people should be grateful that God Ganga maia waters have come to bless their lands and homes.
It is a racket. This will continue till we start electing people who respect the scientific methods and their conclusions.
Yes and that is broadly the safe option. One can build on geological stable high grounds. They are rather and more difficult to build on. We know what happens when we don't.
> Sure, politicians and contractors could do better
It's not mistake of the "oops a typo" variety.
They are knowingly making a freakton of money by endangering the people who ought to know better. I agree sometimes the poor might not have viable alternatives that they can fund with their own bank balance but it seems this is where the governments should step in to fund alternatives. But why do that when there is easy money to be made.
Nepal is literally between rock and a hard place. But in my country, India, there is plenty of this kind of corruption going on.
EDIT:
> I wager that the wealth of those cronies doesn't come close to my western living standards, so who am I to judge?
They are in no way implicated in this particular case but corruption in India can pay very handsomely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Adani#Career
Lookup his brother too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautam_Adani#Career (read the second half closely)
The question is why people build new on known dangerous places. The new is an important word. They do because the future is not priced in (make insurance mandatory?) and because of acts of corruption that actively promote/incentivize development in hazardous areas by rewriting zoning, repricing permits, rewriting saner policies.
BTW, I can't build anything in half of my garden unless I also build huge concrete structures to anchor the terrain, which maybe would make matters worse. My house has been there for about 100 years, the other houses too, maybe it's stable enough but often they allow what's already there and deny anything new. Anyway, it's fine, I don't want to build something there.
No that is not my question at all. In fact I don't have a question, I have a position.
My position is that population density in many of these super dangerous areas is because of corruption laced government policies and practices. The government follows these policies in concert with builders because they can knowingly profit from endangering people (i) in dire straits, (ii) people who are not informed about magnitude of the risks.
In addition to that their corrupt practices distort the market prices so that people end up suckered. If these corrupt practices were to stop or reduce and better more people friendly policies were followed then these place will not become uninhabited but plausible less populated. If you look at my other comments on this story you will get more details of my position.
Some people are in such dire straits that they may still agree to stay in a hazard equivalent to living on Chernobyl lands. Some who are more fortunate would take other options should the government be doing their job.
Hard to build on the mountain, and the valley has transportation, easier to build, fertile land, food and water.
It’s very obvious why humans settle where they do (despite the risks).
Brought up there.
But these people who want to make a buck building garbage somewhere it won't last are largely counterbalanced by the equal and opposite people who seek to financially benefit at society's expense by harnessing the screeching of the useful idiots to get sprinkler systems mandated in garden sheds and mail order carports require engineered plans.
They're basically two sides of the same "slimy people who'll lie for a buck" coin.
For example, there were recent floods, is a location were previous governments had not developed. Now the current government rather than taking accountability are claiming that affected houses should be grateful that they have been touched by the river god.
Difficult to believe, but some people fall for the propaganda.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/kiratpur...
https://citizenmatters.in/shimla-illegal-construction-urbani...
https://youtu.be/IcfbZgaUneQ
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/shimla/muck-in-rive...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/himachal-pradesh/supr...
Why do they have to be “moved”? They are perfectly capable of moving themselves as I can attest to seeing them flooding into my country by the thousands. “The people” make their own choices.
Rather, the entire front face of a glacier at high elevation sheared off, likely millions of tonnes of material at least, crashed down a steep runnel, slammed into the opposing slope on the other side of the valley at the bottom, made that partially collapse, dammed the river for several minutes, and then all descended at high speed as the dam failed, with the results we see.
Some reportage is still saying there was an earthquake - there wasn’t - the landslide itself was the source of the seismic waves.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000tbwb...
USGS is a fact finding organization. They do not regulate. They have been around since 1879. The land surveys they have done made huge impact on society. The reliability of surveys that they have facilitated has made an impact on industrial civilization that few will understand or ever hear about.
For context that's not where the flood happened, there's a massive mountain range in between those vallies reaching over 8000m (Shishapangma).
In earth science there are thousands of worst case scenario models published, but it's hard to actually predict reality.
[1] referenced as Allen et al. (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2019.03.011
[2] https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S20959273193015...
Looks like a warning siren could have saved some lives. But apparently this was a black swan.
What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.
It usually takes entire icebergs calving off to produce such seismic events and intense monsoons to create such flooding.
It seems that past history (especially recent) will not be a good predictor of future events.
While I'd wait for confirmation about the cause of this specific incident, the point you seem to be ignoring is that, due to climate change, events that would have been considered "black swans" historically will become more and more common, to the point that they are expected to occur.
It’s the inflection point when our priors change.
And I have no idea where you got the "rationalized as inevitable in hindsight" thing. I've never heard of that in relation to black swan events before.
This flood is like The Big One in California. We know it is going to happen, it is virtually a certainty. The only question is when and where.
If glacial floods come as a surprise to you, it is only because you have been deliberately ignoring all the climate change warnings. So, a short recap: we'll see massive droughts, giant wildfires, huge floods due to rainfall, significantly more intense hurricanes, mass starvation due to large-scale crop failure, and low-lying countries drowning due to sea level rise. Oh, and add a high likelihood of the AMOC collapsing triggering a cooldown of the East Coast and Europe to the list.
I've been reviewing what coverage I can find of the present event in Nepal/China, in context with Section 5.1, "Comprehensive approach to disaster risk management", of TFA.
It seems that what would be required would be:
- Active surveillance of glacial lake formation.
- Active mitigation of glacial lakes, reducing risk.
- Warning and response infrastructure, procedures, and protocols along the likly flood path.
From video of what I presume are among the worst-hit areas (see: <https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>), there appear to have been at best a few seconds of warning. Very robust structures are demolished virtually instantly. Even had people been sheltering within those structures, or headed up-slope above the water flow, either structural integrity would prove insufficient, or response time inadequate to reach a safe elevation above the debris flow. The latter problem is compounded by what appears to be an extraordinarily strong air blast (likely hurricane-strength or greater) as well as massive amounts of airborne debris, much of it rock.
Terrain is severely constrained in the region, and the only buildable regions are in river valleys themselves. The Gyirong Port border crossing is located deep within a river channel, and despite robust construction simply could not survive the event.
See:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyirong_Port> (Wikipedia article on the port.)
Map / satellite view: <https://www.google.com/maps/@28.2792579,85.3752907,1341m/dat...>
(Take a few minutes to examine the region around the port itself ... there are several communities and businesses all well within the disaster zone, and I suspect that obliteration to those matches or exceeds what was captured on video at the crossing itself.)
From the first video at this Twitter post, a camera situated roughly 20m above the base terrain did not survive the event (though it transmitted for roughly a minute).
A second camera (I believe near the same location) shows similarly catastrophic damage, and no chance for anyone at base level to climb to a safe elevation before being overtaken by the debris flow.
Wikipedia notes "Floodwaters reached settlements as high as 270 feet (80 m) above the river level", citing <https://english.onlinekhabar.com/rasuwa-flood-in-pictures.ht...>.
Climbing that far would require 4--8 minutes for even a highly-fit person. Available response time in the videos I've seen is on the order of 1--2 minutes. Anyone beginning within the debris zone is already walking dead.
As the Cowboy Junkies said:
Anticipation isn't sufficient. Other than entirely abandoning such locations during all periods of high risk, loss of life is likely, and catastrophic property and infrastructure damage inevitable.<https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>
- The crossing was substantially renovated in January of this year following an earlier flood which washed out the bridge connecting the station (in China) to Nepal.
- The crossing, part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative>), by needs must sit on the principal highway through the region. Which ... follows the river valley. Now, it's possible for that highway to be raised substantially off the valley floor, but consider that "inundations reached heights of 800m (2,600 ft) in a valley some 7km (4.3 mi) from the origin" (<https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260827_22/>, via Wikipedia).
- The inundation reached the Gyirong port seven minutes after the initial avalanche. Even with absolutely timely warnings, that is only just barely enough time for a fit person to reach a safe elevation above the port itself. Wikipedia now mentions two people (of apparently hundreds present) being rescued from Gyirong port.
- Early reconnaissance footage above the site of the former Gyirong port shows nothing but bare land. All of the apparently quite substantial structures on the site were simply scrubbed from existence. The forces involved are formidable. <https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1369215.shtml>
I believe that the end of this video shows post-incident video of the same site, though frankly it's unrecognisable. I'm sure we'll have more definitive evidence soon. <https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/other/china-video-shows-muds...>.
- The event is, as has been noted, foreseable, but also unprecedented. There are no events of comparable magnitude in the area, despite previous flooding. The likelihood that this week's incident represents a potential new baseline must be considered.
- Debris flows were moving at roughly 50m/s, or 180 kph (about 110 mph). That's not only an absolutely formidable speed, but a formidable force, where kinetic energy = mass * velocity squared.
The only possible safe refuge I could see would be some sort of underground bunker, into which all staff and travelers would have to locate to in a matter of seconds, and then sealed against water intake, this in a busy border crossing with multiple nationalities and languages in a region with a < 70% literacy rate.
And that's for the Gyirong border station itself. Note that that was a Chinese facility, where China is the vastly wealthier and better-resourced partner to Nepal. Nepal's capabilities to effect similar measures at an equivalent facility or in numerous communities throughout the region is quite limited.
Also affected were numerous other facilities, including a shrine (being visited by numerous Hindu pilgrims), apparently utterly destroyed and all present killed, numerous villages, etc. Roads are heavily damaged if present at all, bridges are washed away, and in a region with tens to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants (based on various county/district Wikipedia pages I've examined), a dozen or so rescue helicopters have so far been summoned.
Oh, and a new glacial/debris dam and lake have formed which is feared may pose an additional outburst flood event within days (<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/nepal-tibet-fl...>).
Ridgelines and slopes are terrible to build on (and often use) because there is little to no actual flat usable area without extensive construction. They also tend to be unstable and slide/erode.
That said, if I was in that area, of course i'd never build/live on anything but the highest ridgeline or slope around.
One of those 'long term/outlier risks cause daily costs' type of things. :s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz>
<https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08954>
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00335...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis>
- The site captured in the video, the Gyirong Port border crossing between China and Nepal, was struck by the flood roughly seven minutes after the presumed avalanche thought to have triggered the event.
- Flood inundation is seen up to 800 m (2,600 ft) above river level, and the camera position in the video at approximately 20--25m (roughly 6--8 stories) above ground level was engaged in the debris flow.
- It would take a fit person 4--8 minutes to climb even 250m or so above ground level, presuming instant notification and a clear evacuation path. Even with an instant warning of upstream conditions survival was overwhelmingly unlikely.
- Subsequent footage appears to show complete obliteration off all structures, with no trace remaining. This is based on preliminary imagery, without precise location information, and in a landscape changed beyond all recognition.
- Astoundingly, two survivors from the Port are mentioned in Wikipedia presently.
Though yes, one of the peculiarities of flood risk is that elevation equals safety. That's modulo a number of other factors though.
In particular, with an event of this magnitude, wind blast is a major effect. Toward the end of one video a line of buses in a car park is seen shifting backward, I suspect due to wind. These can reach well above hurricane force, and of course carries its own debris and threats, where even grass and straw can penetrate deeply. There's also the risk of secondary landslides and the like in steep terrain. One of the regions affected by this event has an etymology from "mud wall", which may be a reference to the geology of the canyon walls themselves. Those could easily be unstable.
Best option is to be lucky and not be there when things go horribly wrong.
Rescue operations in Nepal are in good hands, but this is sadly because those same response orgs had to respond to a similarly brutal cloud burst floods back in 2013 [0], 2021 [1] and 2025 [2].
It also shows the very real and brutal effect climate change is already having, and will only get worse.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_India_floods
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Uttarakhand_flood
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Kishtwar_district_flash_f...
That’s just pure horror, nightmare material
You could probably count 100+ people in the death zone of the border crossing video alone. The final death toll will be terrible, with most never found.
For indians, you also have the religious aspect because the immigration center you go to to visit Mt Kailash is there.
That immigration building was the white one that got completely shredded in the popular video going around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Huascar%C3%A1n_debris_ava...
Similar death toll. Also Orion.
https://www.dogmanray.com/true-stories/orion/
https://www.weather.gov/ajk/suicidebasin
>During the last deglaciation that followed the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, geologists estimate that a cycle of flooding and reformation of the lake lasted an average of 55 years and that the floods occurred dozens of times over the 2,000 years between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago. U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jim O'Connor and Spain's Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales scientist Gerardo Benito have found evidence of at least twenty-five massive floods, the largest discharging about 10 cubic kilometers per hour (2.7 million m³/s, 13 times that of the Amazon River).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
Also it's interesting if you start reading about Native American flood stories, these were not just tales or legends but telling actual historic events that the ancestors experienced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods#Early_flood_st...
From rock climbing, I have a sense of erosion features and their scale. Turbulent flow can carve out huecos in sandstone. They look like someone used a 2ft ice cream scooper on the rock.
Now trying to scale up that model to the size of scablands is hard to wrap my head around.
This is one of the few interesting things I've learn from the rogan podcast.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RopVmgqbt20
exceptionaly brutal cctv footage from the tibet/nepal border, so many people that there is a tiny chance that perhaps one of them was tossed clear, but of the rest there will be no remains. other videos shows that the flood "water" is so thick with mud that it is sheering off in sheets and one more shows it ripping out a concrete bridge that then floats away on top. *disturbing video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rIVNeDuCF_k
<https://english.news.cn/20260827/a8eb0a7aedb34d9181793f5fbc0...>
Otherwise China report 3 dead and 558 missing, not clear if at the port itself or the surrounding county, or how accurate counts of those present at the port might be.
Not sure this is confirmed at this time.
fixed, but some things are better off wrong perhaps
Not long after that, Ethiopia was in the news for... anyone?
Lots and lots of ignoring scientists. Nothing new here.
Cassandra
But do you have a statistics on how often these predictions are wrong?
I mentioned a personal anecdote, and a personal observation that things people think are new; are not, in fact, new. Us old people do that a lot. We've seen a lot of stuff.
The usual HN rude demand for "statistics," which almost certainly exist; both pro and con my observation, was made. Basically "Do a whole lot of work I don't feel like doing, and if you don't, you're wrong! (Nyah-Nyah)"
I said no. You show me yours (I know they can, if they look). It was a casual statement, on my part, and I really don't care about being right. It's not worth it, to me. If someone else has something to prove, go for it. I won't defend my position. I left (dropped out of, actually) High School, a long time ago, and what other people think of me, doesn't really drive me, anymore. I'll happily cede the point. If I decide they're right, I may even admit it.
In any case, exchanges like this get quite amusing.
Since you don't have them, I have to suppose you just like being on a high horse...
I’m not losing any sleep over it.
Have a great day!
"As placed in the press by the same think tanks upselling tobacco" - yes.
Paid for and spun as media confusion by powerful oil and resource extractors, such as but not limited to the Koch brothers, yes.
As a reaction to the late 1960 papers on CO2 impacts being taken seriously by world forums - yes.
But an actual significant number of atmospheric scientists and global modellers "panicking" about glacial expansion of the ice age we're currently in (you know, an ice age being any era during which ice covers the poles) ... uhhh, no.
Mainly as that didn't happen.
I remember them referencing global cooling on science Friday on NPR as late as 2005
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1hajzg9/here_is_th...
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/876
The cooling was from nuclear war.
If one simply concluded that with current climate changes, it's not safe for humans to live under that risk, how many villages and cities would find themselves uninhabitable all of a sudden?
The events, even with increased frequency, are relatively rare (perhaps a few times a decade), quite sudden, utterly overwhelming, and destructive to virtually everything in their path.
The only assured safety practice would be to keep out of the danger zone entirely, and even this is challenging:
- There's very little habitable or arable land, and much of that is in river valleys (e.g., in the heart of the risk zone).
- Many mountainous regions are poor, and Nepal particularly so. Governmental and institutional resources are highly constrained, corruption, opportunism, and risk-taking behaviours are common.
- It's not possible to construct around the risks, as even the most robust structures are utterly demolished. Post-incident imagery shows bare land scrubbed clean near Gyirong Port, for example. Underground shelter might be possible. But ...
- Response times are on the order of seconds to minutes. The elapsed time from the glacial collapse (captured by seismometers) to the debris wall striking Gyirong Port was roughly seven minutes. That's about as much time as would be necessary to climb to a safe(r) elevation or enter an underground shelter. Even then, survivors would have to wait to be dug out, potentially days or weeks later.
- Flood run-ups of as high as 800m (2,6000 ft) were reported within 7-8 km of the start of the incident. Even further down the river valley flood depths hit 9m (27 ft) within 30 minutes. Depending on local topography it would be necessary to move a considerable horizontal distance to reach a safe vertical elevation. Though there's an inverse relation between narrowness of a channel and the direct kinetic risk, in the case of this event, even a fairly broad floodplain would have presented considerable risk, and refuge structures would have to be exceptionally robust to survive and provide protection.
Monitoring of potential risks, advanced warning (that is, of a potential situation rather than a current one), and evacuation of the affected area would be necessary.
Anything constructed within the risk area would have to be seen as a sacrifice zone. Ironically the Gyirong Port was substantially rebuilt this past January following similar, though lesser floods about a year ago which wiped out the Friendship Bridge between China and Nepal. Infrastructure such as roads and bridges might be elevated above river level, but would otherwise have to be rebuilt following events.
Advance warnings are disruptive and often turn out not to reflect a manifest threat. With time, public and business response tends to be to deprecate and ignore such warnings. The region has a literacy rate below 70%, as well as being both an international trade route and tourist region, further complicating communications, awareness, and compliance with emergency preparation and response efforts.
This isn't to say that nothing can be done, but there are no easy choices, and local poverty will make even modest efforts challenging.
https://www.dogmanray.com/true-stories/orion/
https://greatergood.com/blogs/news/heroic-dog-rocky-saves-63...
It would have been more apt if his name was Sirius.
Sadly it's not uncommon to see teenage and young men groups to seek out puppies and pregnant strays to stone to death in Himachal and Uttarakhand (two states in Himalayan India). Properly vaccinated they can be protectors.
As I've heard tell, this was a glacial collapse into and blocking a river, which then built up a head of pressure behind it, bursting to release a hammer blow of river water and debris that travelled a great distance.
Similar things can happen due to landslides into rivers; it depends on the topology of the land, here long narrow valleys carved out by heavy water flows.
The warning being, don't live in a natural "drainpipe".
In mountainous regions that's often not much of an option, there's a lot of vertical sides and valley bottoms.
From what I've understood, the collapsing glacier either contained enough liquid water or melted enough from the impact that it continued flowing downstream. It covered ~20 horizontal kilometers in about 7 minutes before hitting the border crossing.
It had the look of a large volume of water quickly released.
Massive tonnages breaking off of a glacier is still going to be mostly ice on impact .. there's a chance debris and ice chunks made a temporary dam as the bulk of the now shattered glacier ice released water putting pressure on that weak dam - leading to collapse and release.
We do know that a glacier substantially collapsed.
What contributed to the amount of water in the debris flow isn't clear. Speculation, from trained geologists, is that the friction of the glacier flow itself contributed to melt. I'm speculating that recent rains or higher temperatures might have contributed to melting on the glacier (and have seen some commentary speculating about this).
Speculating on my part: There might also have been accumulated water below the glacier, liberated by the ice flow, or perhaps groundwater which was evacuated along with other material. Events seem to have precipitated too quickly (roughly 7 minutes from galcial collapse to Gyirong Port inundation) for the collapse to have formed, then broken, a dam on tributary waterways upstream of the port.
GLOF is a recognised threat, but this event seems to have been at best only partially explained by that, and may be an entirely different mechanism. The follow-on studies should be fascinating, in the way that horrific disasters often are.
> Speculation, from trained geologists
Probably about on par with speculation from trained geophysicists I'd warrant.
Re "speculation, ...": my point being expertise, but based on background knowledge rather than close event-specific observations or measurements. Yes, geophysicists would be an equivalent level of expertise.
That might take some infrastructure to cover everywhere such things can happen (eg: the beds of rivers in Western Australia's Pilbara and Kimberley regions have a high flash flooding risk in the wet season.
What's the land area you'd like seamlessly and continuously monitored by a mobile object with moving parts ... and how is that a better solution than using static solar powered instrumentation?
Geologists have used the latter for many decades. Monitors upslope of at-risk glaciers, solar/battery powered, and communicating by radio (or Internet / satellite links) could be part of this.
See for example the extensive seismic monitoring of California's San Andreas Fault, particularly at Parkfield and through the Carrizo Plain / CA Hwy 25.
<https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/parkfield/safod_pbo.php>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrizo_Plain>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_25>
(Different tech, obviously, but in situ ground-based sensors which share some similarities.)
Multiple sat observations a day is great, obviously, but sudden collapses / changes often won't get flagged for seven or eight hours after the event.