‘A mountain is safer than this’
Bikash Suwal, a lithe, tanned Nepali trekking guide, has climbed t he 18,805-foot Yala Peak in the towering Himalayas. But since a powerful earthquake rocked Nepal a week ago, he has been afraid to climb the stairs to the rented rooms he shares with five family members.
Like many of his neighbours in the usually thrumming Gongabu area of Kathmandu, Suwal fears that the buildings still standing are so poorly constructed they may be toppled by aftershocks.
“A mountain is safer than this,” he said Wednesday of the four-storey concrete and brick building where he lives. “Up there, climbing, I sometimes feel afraid, but not like this. This kind of danger is not in my hands.”
Jittery fear has coursed through Nepal’s storied capital, Kathmandu, since Saturday’s quake, which is thought to have killed more than 6,250 people across the country.
Ancient temples in Kathmandu crumpled from the intense pulses of seismic energy that the earthquake unleashed, but so did many dozens of buildings constructed after a modern building code was put in place.
That has ignited public alarm that the collapses exposed not only flaky concrete and brittle pillars, but also a system of government enforcement rotted by corruption and indifference.
Residents and building experts say the corruption is an open secret, as evident as the unlicensed five- and six-storey buildings that have risen in recent years, displacing twostorey ones that sprang up in former farm fields starting a decade or so ago.
“We pay like this,” said Bir Bahadur Khadwada — the owner of the Kalika Guest- house, frequented by migrant workers in Gongabu — as he rubbed his thumb with his index finger under his dining table. “They go away.” Nepali experts said bribery, lax law enforcement and a lack of land-use controls left buildings vulnerable to seismic disasters. But several said those problems were symptoms of a deeper failing: the government’s inability to keep up with a rapidly urbanizing society.
Since the nation’s building code was introduced in the 1990s, the population of greater Kathmandu more than doubled. It grew to 1.74 million in 2011, the year of the last census, from 675,000 in 1991 as migrants began pressing into the city, drawn by jobs and services that distant villages can only dream about: regular electricity, water and satellite television.
In recent decades, however, the Nepali government has undergone a convulsive succession of crises, including a bloody 10-year civil war with Maoist insurgents, that diverted government priorities and revenue from the task of managing urban growth.
Geology further complicated matters: Kathmandu is the ancient bed of a lake, and haphazard urban growth has allowed construction to spread to risky terrain, said Richard Sharpe, a New Zealand earthquake engineer who helped draft Nepal’s building code.
Despite many such warnings from scientists in recent years, modern housing, malls and shops, some built with breathless haste, filled in the contours of a city revered for its ancient monuments and temples.
“I think there’s still a hell of a lot of informal building,” Sharpe said in a telephone interview, referring to unlicensed and unplanned development. “And you’re in the Kathmandu Valley, but what about the other 90 per cent of the people, who are in the hills? How can you enforce the building code in the hills?”
The effects of Kathmandu’s uncontrolled growth are distilled in Gongabu, where dozens of buildings collapsed and others slipped off their foundations and onto their sides.
When t he ear thquake struck on Saturday, residents rushed onto the main street to escape the swaying buildings. But many did not make it.
How can you enforce the building code in the hills?