Officials in Nepal put the preliminary death toll at 1053, nearly all of them in the valley around Katmandu... The quake set off avalanches around Mount Everest, where several hikers were reported to have died... [T]he most terrible damage on Saturday was to the oldest part of the city, which is studded with temples and palaces made of wood and unmortared brick.
For many, the most breathtaking loss was the nine-story Dharahara Tower, which was built in 1832 on the orders of the queen. The tower had recently reopened to the public, which could ascend a narrow spiral staircase to a viewing platform around 200 feet above the city.... The police on Saturday said they had pulled around 60 bodies from the rubble of the tower....
April 25, 2015
"A powerful earthquake shook Nepal on Saturday near its capital, Katmandu, flattening sections of the city’s historic center..."
"... and trapping dozens of sightseers in a 200-foot watchtower that came crashing down into a pile of bricks."
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A sad business.
Kathmandu has turned into a bit of a cliche'd tourist destination, but it really is worth a visit.
I hope repairs are possible.
More so than much else in India IMHO. Also more comfortable.
We were in Venice, and we were told the best view of St. Mark's clock tower (Torre dell'Orologio) was from the top of the Campanile. We waited for the clock to strike noon.
I knew we were in trouble, when the bell in the top of the Campanile started to ever so slightly swing 30 seconds before the top of the hour.
I don't do towers anymore.
...unmortared brick...
Bad stuff.
I wonder if Bob Seger ever made it to Katmandu. -CP
Continent to continent tectonic collisions-everything is bigger.
Stream of shock consciousness. . .
Geez. (Wait, Is that taking the lord's name in vain?)
I don't like the "scorched earth" theme of these times, it is coming from all sides. Certainly we have plenty of man-made intentional, meticulously planned "destruction", both "Good" and "bad", from toasting Wisconsin lawns to Isis chopping up old Gods.
Now you add the earth-shaking spontaneous "all Things Made New" "prunings" of Mighty Nature and "oy vey" ( wait is that TTLNIV again?)
I am getting more nervous about all powers in motion. I can't be sober enough to meet this all correctly.
Too much More on the man-made:
A currently very-empowered man, who built the cruelest kind of bombs against Americans long before the Boston Marathon bombs, spoke at one of our esteemed Oregon universities this last week, gloating that America is over. Interesting that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others are protested and caused to not be allowed to speak on campuses, but bill ayers draws hushed, respectful crowds and no protests? Scorched Earth-destroy the towers tactics are working, how scary.
Plus, I am not allowed to use the correct word here for much if what has grabbed the balls of the nation. Though Lenny Bruce has been tagged and admired on this blog, not all words will be allowed, one especially. If I could write it here, I would say:
"The ( 'that word in plural' ) have succeeded over American culture, and we are living their dream on earth. They swallowed the feminist movement whole and righteously fill our schools and government and airwaves. The ( 'that word in plural' ) come in both righteous female bodies and well-trained male forms, who have long ago learned that checking their phallic privilege gets them more nookie. Our president is the First ( that Word ) President, and this is the First (that word ) administration. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are both Supreme Leader (That Word Plural).
So many towers of treasure, of Mind, of civilization, are falling down by so many means.
I am going to go sit and Hold the High Watch, be still with the .tao, witness the great good, everywhere present Boddhi, calling of each heart and every particle into being. Can I be in the right place, and find my gratitude for this epic moment now?however much I can, I stand tall, pull my shoulders back and lift my eyes to the mountains. From the bottoms of my feet into the earth and through the top of head out and up and from the center of my body in all directions, I telegraph out my heart's blessing on all those making hard choices this day, and all those facing their Maker.
Good be with us all, guide us each and every one.
The Washington Monument was closed for almost three years following the 5.8 mag quake in northern Virginia back in 2011. The Nepal quake was a 7.8. or 961 times as strong as the Virginia one. Not a shock that a tower hit by that would have trouble surviving.
You climate change denialists have more blood on your hands today.
This is where the Himalayas are being pushed up by the Indian plate sliding under Asia, so although an earthquake is tragic, not really shocking or unprecedented. The world is a more crowded place than throughout history so the human impacts are bigger. The tower is one of two, and both were destroyed in previous earthquakes and this one had a little still standing and was rebuilt. Somewhere in the 30s. All in all, sad but historically not too significant.
Praying for the people of Nepal, for the missing, their families and the rescue workers.
Our world seems so full of tragedy these days.
campy said...You climate change denialists have more blood on your hands today.
Smile. The Earth will still be here, long after life is extinct.
Life is redundant. It's a terminal sexually transmitted disease.
Instead of fracking, maybe they can blame this earthquake on... Yaking ".
Earthquakes are going off all over. Volcanoes are erupting. And human DNA is being modified in labs.
Jerusalem for the first time is surrounded by enemies that who are the best friends of the President of the USA.
The Great and Terrible Day is near. Isaac Newton had it right.
This is in reality an excellent reason for westernization. The majority of the deaths and injuries in countries like Nepal are the lack of effective building techniques. In Nepal the majority of the deaths come from unmortored brick houses collapsing on the inhabitants.
Blogger campy said...
You climate change denialists have more blood on your hands today.
************
It takes a FOOL - a Fully Certified ISO 9000 FOOL --to believe earthquakes are caused by climate change.
What is your mechanism connecting the two, sirrah? If human-caused climate change is responsible for earthquakes, how can you explain the ones that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 or Tokyo in 1923?
An no, there's no evidence that modern earthquakes are either stronger or more frequent than in the past.
****
Thirty-five odd years ago I spent a lot of time trekking in Nepal, carrying my own gear and living off the local economy, when trekkers were far and few between.
So it's a real place to me, and I'm sad to see what's happened to it.
On Thursday evening our waitress at a local Asian eatery turned out to be from Kathmandu, and now our family can only think of her and what she's going through, worrying about friends and family back home.
Campy
Questioning the accuracy of computer models almost always causes earthquakes.
You are in need of help, dude.
No doubt caused by Texan fracking.
I doubt that bricks were not laid in mortar, but some steel reinforcement probably would have helped.
But D-O-W probably was hard to come by in Nepal in 1832.
In re climate change and this earthquake - is joke comrade.
campy: You climate change denialists have more blood on your hands today.
You climate alarmists never miss the chance to use dead bodies as props for your religious bullshit.
Come to think of it, back in the eighties I believe I caused the Loma Linda earthquake when I challenged some assumptions on an analyst's spreadsheet. I am not sure climate change was in full throat at that stage.
Blogger Fen said...
You climate alarmists never miss the chance to use dead bodies as props for your religious bullshit.
4/25/15, 2:51 PM
Why HTML still doesn't have a sarcasm tag, I'll never understand.
Never go full retard, campy. You just went full retard...
Campi's CAGW sarcasm gets a hysterical response, yet TraditionalGuy's prediction that the Nepalese earthquake is the sign of the Apocalypse goes unnoticed...
Howard
Honey, do you know the meaning of "hysterical?"
traditionalguy said...Isaac Newton had it right.
Leibniz had it right, Newton only plagiarized him.
Campi's CAGW sarcasm gets a hysterical response
"Poe's law, named after its author Nathan Poe,[1] is a literary adage which stipulates that, without a clear indicator of an author's intention, it is often impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of such extremism.[2]"
Climate alarmism jumped that shark some time ago.
Fen: you are correct, the climate alarmists, like the homo-alarmists, the minority-alarmists and and the islamofascist-alarmist continue to whinge and bleat their pathetic fraidy-cat mantra's.
Also, don't blame Poe for your stupidity. Real men shun credit and accept blame.
Michael: I wasn't really speaking about you, your responses indicated that you may have a healthy uterus.
Traditionalguy is raising a non-scientific point. A religious or supernatural point. There is no implicit claim of a shared scientific paradigm like the global climate linkage.
Its hard to object to traditional guy unless one wants a fruitless debate over religion, or prophecy, or some emotional state of mind.
For that matter I have my own gut, non-rational feeling that things are going badly and will shortly get much worse, entirely within the scope of human affairs, and nothing to do with acts of God.
The Nepal earthquake isn't part of it, this sort of thing is SOP in nature. Disasters like these have always happened and this one is nowhere near as terrible as it could have been, thankfully. One should worry rather should there be an extended lack of earthquakes.
World Map of Fault Lines
Tragic indeed.
The major present day fault lines.
The minor present ones are not shown, nor old major ones that presumably could become active again.
When did "whinge" become a word? I never heard it before the early 2000s, when I first encountered it on the Internet. I thought it was a typo, a misspelling of "whine."
Whinge is British slang.
I'm guessing it came into the internet from some of those guys. Sullivan ?
The tower photo BTW is an example of a really bad use of a Cokin graduated filter.
When I was in India we visited Nepal. It is hard for an American to visit Nipal.
"Google Executive Killed in Avalanche on Mount Everest
Google executive Dan Fredinburg was among 18 people killed on Mount Everest after a 7.8 earthquake ripped through Nepal on Saturd..."
http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/google-executive-killed-in-avalanche-on-mount-everest-nepal-earthquake-1201480024/
@Ann,
I notice that this earthquake has generated some news, but not a lot.
Not nearly as much as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
(I can't remember, off-hand, if this quake is a higher magnitude quake than the 2011 quake. However, I'm certain that residents of the area are happy that no nearby nuclear power plants are damaged...)
The first news I heard of the quake was from an old acquaintance, who had spent some time in downtown Kathmandu in the week before the quake.
It's sad, but I notice that the death toll isn't estimated to be high now. It could have run much higher.
Kathmandu is on soft soil, and has many buildings that aren't built to handle earthquakes.
And it is on the edge of a fault-line which has seen several large quakes in the past two centuries.
The tower is not actually from 1832 - it was rebuilt after the last big earthquake.
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