On April 25th, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated the country of Nepal in South Asia.
As of April 28th, the death toll has reached over 4,600, and the number of injured continues
to grow.
Nepal’s Prime Minister has warned that the death toll could even hit 10,000, with the
UN saying at least 8 million people have been affected by the quake.
As was the case with the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the significant loss of life and property
damage can be attributed to a few combined factors.
These factors made the disaster much worse than with similarly sized earthquakes elsewhere.
So, why was the Nepal Earthquake so devastating?
Well, the most significant factor in earthquake casualties is how populated the area is.
Nepal is home to nearly 28 million residents, with a population density of about 186 people
per square kilometer.
That’s more than 5 and a half times the density of the United States.
Heavily populated areas tend to produce a lot of casualties during natural disasters.
By comparison, an 8.4 magnitude earthquake in Southern Peru in 2001 killed 75 people.
This was largely due to Peru’s extremely low population density of 23 people per square
kilometer.
The other important element is the ability of the local buildings and infrastructure
to withstand major earthquakes.
As seismologists sometimes say, “earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people”.
In particular, a 2013 assessment by World Bank said that Nepal’s rapid development
and urbanisation has led to a lack of government planning and control over infrastructure and
building standards..
As such, the capital of Nepal, Kathmandu (kat-man-du), has been called one of the most earthquake-vulnerable
cities in the world.
A 2001 study stated that “a person living in Kathmandu is about nine times more likely
to be killed by an earthquake than a person living in Islamabad, and about 60 times more
likely than a person living in Tokyo.”
An older study by GeoHazards International found that nearly two-thirds of Kathmandu’s
buildings would suffer major damage from an earthquake.
Similarly large earthquakes in 1934 and 1988 have killed thousands in Nepal’s history.
Despite their unpredictability, the catastrophic results of a major earthquake can easily be
seen in advance.
Hopefully, this disaster will push other, at-risk countries, into strengthening their
earthquake safety codes.
If you’d like to learn the science of why this earthquake was so devastating, watch
this video from DNews.
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