"Wind variable at two knots, runway zero two, cleared to land."
I lowered the landing gear, extended the flaps fully and received clearance to land. Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport, half hidden in the clouds, came into view. Nestled against the Himalayas, it is notorious among pilots for its difficult approach and its elevation of 4,390 feet above sea level.
I have flown here more than 20 times, but this time my heart was heavy throughout the approach. A landslide had struck the north of the country without warning, causing the worst loss of life in its history.
"Are the people all right?"
Among the victims were Koreans. That made the weight heavier still. Rasuwa, where the disaster struck, lies about 180 kilometers from the capital, Kathmandu, and people say the capital is safe. But I had not seen it with my own eyes, so I could not be sure. Turning these thoughts over, I set the aircraft down on the runway.
After the long flight from the United Arab Emirates, we were given a one-day layover. That gave me time to see with my own eyes how this country was enduring the disaster.
Step out of the crew gate and you are on the road in front of the airport. People were there. About 30 of them, more sitting than standing. They had settled onto the steps in front of shuttered shops, onto the curb, even onto the asphalt itself. Overhead, power lines ran in tangles. Across the street, shops with energy drink signs were open as usual.
Two ambulances stood with their engines off. A single yellow tent had been pitched. Water bottles rolled about at people's feet. Many wore red traditional clothing. Every one of them held a mobile phone — pressed to an ear, or with eyes on the screen, or simply gripped in a hand. No one was crying. No one was shouting.
Most people rescued from Rasuwa are taken first to an army camp at Nuwakot, farther down. Only the severely injured are moved to Kathmandu. So some families wait here, holding on to the hope that their relatives might come. On Friday alone, 14 helicopters flew more than 200 sorties and carried 900 people out.
That afternoon, though, almost no helicopters could take off. The clouds hung low.
The Himalayas seen from the cockpit. Clouds fill entire valleys, leaving only the ridgelines visible.
In mountain gorges, helicopter pilots generally fly by looking at the terrain with their own eyes. The ground is too rugged to descend on instruments alone. If you cannot see below, you cannot go in, and if you go in and get trapped by cloud, there is nowhere to get out. So there is far less flying time available than one might think.
A woman saw my uniform and asked me in English.
"Are you a pilot? Will the helicopters fly today?"
I told her I did not know. She nodded once, then turned to look back toward the airport. We were barely 300 meters from the runway where we had just landed.
The cafe was packed with tourists and locals.
I dropped my bags at the hotel and took a bus into the neighborhood. The streets of Nepal were not what I had expected. They were as noisy as ever, cars filled the roads and the horns never stopped. The souvenir shops in the alleys of Thamel were open. Schoolgirls in uniform walked past laughing, and delivery motorbikes wove between them.
I went into a nearby cafe and found every seat taken. It had a stylish interior with potted plants and sofas, a place that would not look out of place in any city in the world. Foreigners with backpacks sat with laptops open. The cafe was full of laughter, and people's faces were bright.
I asked one of the staff how business was.
"Customers are the same as before. Kathmandu is fine. But a colleague took leave yesterday. He had a brother in Rasuwa. They still haven't found him."
He paused, then added:
"Almost everyone here has a relative somewhere up north."
How the tragedy began
At 8:37 a.m. on August 26, a mass of ice broke away whole from Langtang Lirung and fell more than a kilometer straight down. Its volume reached 100 million to 200 million cubic meters. The ice dammed a tributary called the Lende Khola, then gave way, sending water pouring down the gorge at 180 kilometers per hour. In places the flood stood close to 100 meters high. Villages sitting 80 meters above the riverbed were swept away.
When seismographs picked up tremors equivalent to a magnitude 5.2, everyone first believed an earthquake had struck. Only later did the U.S. Geological Survey correct the reading, attributing the tremors to a landslide. In the 24 hours before the disaster, no rain had fallen and the sky had been clear.
As of August 31, the death toll stood at 919, with 4,793 missing. It is the deadliest disaster in Nepal's history. One-tenth of the country's entire power generation capacity vanished in half a day, and the bodies of some victims were found in India, 240 kilometers from the site.
Seven minutes after the seismographs registered the tremors, the border checkpoint was gone without a trace. The upstream monitoring station was washed away before it could send an alert. The equipment had been installed to monitor seasonal flooding, and a glacier collapse was not something it was built to detect.
Seven minutes is long enough to step out for a cigarette and come back in. That was all the time those people had left.
I had lunch at a Korean restaurant. The server who came to take my order greeted me in careful Korean. Gurung, 38, said he had worked for five years at an auto parts factory in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, before returning to Nepal. Nepal is among the countries that send the most workers to Korea under the Employment Permit System. Since the agreement was signed in 2007, 100,000 people have built ties with Korea.
"A lot of people in Rasuwa have been to Korea too. They earned money and built houses, and then…"
Then he asked me a question.
"Was this on the news in Korea? Was there a lot about it?"
I told him there was. Nine Koreans went missing in the disaster, after all. But that was probably not the only thing he wanted to know.
Back at the hotel, I went up to the roof and found a few foreigners sitting there. I talked with Keller, 32, a German spending a month in Nepal.
"It would be a lie to say I'm not worried. But I already rented an Airbnb nearby for a month, and they say Kathmandu is fine, so I'm just staying."
He said he was thinking of going to volunteer.
"Right now I'm waiting for permission from the Nepalese government. They've closed it off so not just anyone can go in."
Is this someone else's problem?
That evening at the hotel I spoke with Mingma, 41, who works as a Himalayan trekking guide. He said he had spent his whole life going up and down the mountains of the Langtang region. When I asked him about the mountains, he thought for a moment and then pointed upward.
"Ten years ago there was ice up there. Now it's just rock. We go up every year, so we see it change a little at a time. But we never thought it would come down all at once like this."
Come to think of it, Dubai, where I live, went through something similar two years ago. This desert city took 160 millimeters of rain in a single day. Its average annual rainfall is less than 100 millimeters. A year and a half's worth of rain fell in one day, flooding the airport, canceling 1,200 flights and causing the worst flood damage in the city's history. The cause was the Arabian Sea, warmed by a changing climate.
What I learned then was that this city had not been built with that much rainfall in mind. Who would have expected that much rain to fall on a desert in a single day? Rasuwa was no different. Most of our civilization is designed around the climate of the past.
Is Korea any safer? Looking back, the number of unusually hot or cold days, days that fall outside what we have taken for granted about the weather, keeps rising.
Catastrophe gives no warning before it begins. It is only that, this time, by luck, it was not our turn.
On the morning I left Nepal, the streets were noisy again. Horns sounded, motorbikes wove between people and cars, and the shops opened as usual.
The people swept away by the water that day had done nothing wrong. They simply lived below a mountain, or had come to another country to build a power plant. Nine of them were Korean.
Inside Kathmandu's airport hangs a large poster reading "I'm in Nepal." It shows a Nepalese girl smiling with her hands pressed together. I had walked past it countless times without a thought, but that day the girl looked as though she were praying, and I bowed my head for a moment.
May the victims rest in peace.
