7.8 Earthquake Rocks Nepal, Hundreds Dead

An anonymous reader writes: Nepal was struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 today, with an epicenter 80 km east of the country's second biggest city, Pokhara. Its effects were also strongly felt in the capital, Kathmandu. Casualty reports conflict, but authorities have indicated at least 500 are dead and many more are feared to be trapped. Nepal has declared a state of emergency for the affected areas, and asked for international humanitarian assistance. India and Pakistan have both offered help. Some Indian cities were affected by the earthquake as well, and there are reports of avalanches on Mt. Everest, which has many climbers at any given time.

Comments

Re:News for nerds

[hcs_$reboot]

This is /. so we can expect comments about 1) was Nepal ready to fight such a disaster, compared to, eg, Japan 2) what are the progresses in terms of EQ detection 3) what is the chance of such a strong EQ happening in that region 4) do we have more & more of such big disasters recently 5) is it linked to the Sun activity, linked to the human oil/gas digging 6) will China offers help to Nepal? ... All of this is rather interesting IMO, so wait and watch!

Pohkara is beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

Pohkara is beautiful with about 400K people living in the area. My thoughts go out to all the people impacted.

Only spent a few weeks in Nepal around Holi time and found the people there to be wonderful, generous, and fun!

I was there upgrading the wifi network infrastructure at a Buddhist Monastery. The monks need their youtube. ;) Worked on my karma at the same time.

Getting help to that part of the country will be difficult.

Re:Pohkara is beautiful

[Zontar The Mindless]

Some of us visit other places and try to learn something from the peoples and cultures we encounter there. Some of us spend their days in their mothers' basements cursing those who aren't afraid to emerge.

Re: Pohkara is beautiful

[ColdWetDog]

If you get yourself stomped in an earthquake, maybe we will send you a package of Doritos and a new keyboard. But that's only if your karma improves. Right now, you're looking to get a couple of Slashdot dupes.

And we're being generous.

Re:Pohkara is beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hardly a hipster, but whatever.

Balding, middle aged, father, former athlete (Olympic trial level in '84) with an interest in travel, helping others, and Linux. For years, I was a low-paid government contractor at NASA working on incredible stuff. You've seen my work if you've seen anything related to manned space flight in the last 30 yrs. I'm positive.

Nothing apple here - btw. Isn't that a requirement to be a hipster? Me?

Went to Nepal because a friend of a friend asked - and it was once-in-a-lifetime. While there, I met with the local KTM Google/OWASP group.
To get to Pohkara, we took a 12 hr bus from Kathmandu (about US$9). Normally it was 6 hrs, but due to unrest in a city between, the 1.5 lane mountain road was blocked and we sat for 6 hrs with 2000+ other vehicles (probably 20K people where stuck). There aren't any alternative routes. Having long talks with locals on the bus brings a new understanding. Someone pulled out a frisbee and we threw it around with locals for a few hrs before dark. There was a Deep Purple concert billboard on the road just outside KTM - none of the locals on the bus had heard of Deep Purple before - didn't know they they'd rent a venue. I couldn't have paid to have this experience. Most tourist take the plane between Pohkara and KTM. We had stocked up on snacks and shared what we had with others on the bus. They shared what they had too. Nobody expected to be stuck in a huge lineup on the side of a mountain rd for 6 hrs in the middle of Nepal.

Life is about experiences. At least it is for me.

I could have stayed home and skipped over the Tokyo and Seoul parts of the trip where I was just a tourist. That's what many people would do - like you, I suspect. I have the time, enough money and the desire for travel to different parts of the world, meet different peoples and try to be nice so our overbearing US government isn't the only reference point for these people. In the 1990s, I worked in Tokyo 2 weeks at a time for a few years. Hipster? Me?

Oh - and I've never lived on the west coast of the USA. Sorry.
Hipster? Me? Nope. Now get off my lawn.

Re:Why would God do this?

[Adriax]

"Stop learning so much about the world around you. Knowing why complex natural events happen makes it harder to control people through fear of our magic invisible sky ruler."

Re:Why would God do this?

[TheGratefulNet]

look, how many times do we have to go over this?

the 'sky ruler' is a false god.

this really pisses off the real god, the sky protractor. if you piss him off, he'll send all kinds of scary angles you way.

Re:News?

[EmeraldBot]

Poor undeveloped country has insufficient building standards for regular predictable natural disaster. People die.

Its not going to affect me, there is nothing I can do to help, and its hardly surprising, so why care? Not news for anyone, let alone nerds.

Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people. If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?

And by the way, I'd consider a earthquake capable of unleashing 7.8 Megatons of energy and leveling entire cities to be worthy of my morning news.

Re:earthquakes in Nepal?

[cheesybagel]

It's the Indian-Asian boundary. India is a subcontinent on its own tectonic plate which has been crushing into Asia for a long time. The place where the plates collide is in the Himalayas. Those mountains are still increasing in altitude because of that.

Re:Why would God do this?

[pitchpipe]

Just accept that there is a reason for everything, and He has a plan.

His reasoning sucks and he is a horrible planner. I wonder if he has an MBA.

Re:Why would God do this?

[pitchpipe]

"He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God."
Isaac Newton

Also, alchemy. Don't forget alchemy.

Re:earthquakes in Nepal?

[tnk1]

The Himalayas are there because they are on a plate boundary where one plate is colliding with another. At this one, instead of subduction, we have collision and uplift. And this uplift we happen to call the Himalayas.

I'm surprised that there aren't *more* earthquakes of high intensity there.