A decade of our fault lines

IT WAS AN ORDINARY lunchtime until Saraswati felt a tickle on her feet. The floor began to tremble as she stood to scoop more rice onto her plate. Within seconds, she realised it wasn’t a sensation—it was an earthquake. With her husband and two children, she rushed beneath the doorframe, heart pounding.

“It turned scary after we saw the eastern walls of Singhadurbar into rubble,” said Saraswati Khatri, in her mid-30s, who used to live in Anamnagar when the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake struck the country. “We lived inside the [Singhadurbar] compound for four nights.”

For her, fear compounded after learning Dharahara had fallen and that people died. It has traumatised her for life, as even a bodily sensation evokes moments of panic. 

Her brother-in-law, a government overseer currently posted in Bardiya, had survived the Durbar High School collapse. Uncles who had lost contact with him—and hope of his being alive—went to different hospital mortuaries searching for his body. Telecommunications and the internet were down for days after the first quake. “His friends had taken him to KMC in Sinamangal. He underwent multiple surgeries before resuming normal life,” added Saraswati.

This Friday marks 10 years of the deadly and scary Gorkha earthquake, which measured 7.8 magnitude on the Richter scale, claimed over 9,000 lives and inflicted economic loss estimated at over $7 billion, and was followed by a powerful aftershock two and a half weeks later (May 12), recording at 7.3.

 

 

The house Sarita Kalakheti had rented in Kalikasthan was as old as without pillars, and could not stand the tremors. But what scared her even more was the 17-storey Silver City Apartments, which she remembers “dangling” just opposite. The apartment, completed in 2013, sustained multiple cracks, which were later retrofitted.

“We [she and her daughter] took shelter at the nearby Vijay Samarak School until I found a room in Ghattekulo and shifted there,” said she, “I don’t think the apartment would survive another earthquake. The government should not have allowed such a tall building in the middle of a dense settlement like Dillibazaar.”

Another person joined the conversation in the middle, who lives beside the apartment. He echoed Sarita’s concerns about the apartment and such structures, considering recent seismic activities, erupting regular quakes between 3 to 6 magnitude, will bring another big quake.

My colleagues at the_farsight lived through the 2015 quakes in Kathmandu. They recall elders warning them to stay home, despite cracks, even when aftershocks hit, as there was hardly any open space, rendering it safer to stand under the doorframe than going outside—on roads—surrounded by multistorey concrete structures.

One of them, who was 14, said, “The collapse of houses instilled fear [in me] of walking through the alleys for years.” Said another, who was 10, “Hit by crisis, people helped each other in whatever way they could.”

What has changed? What didn’t?

First and foremost, Nepal’s tectonic time bomb—

The standstill Himalayas have been forming for millions of years now, as the Indian tectonic plate is still subducting the Eurasian plate.

This process gave birth to fault lines, better known as the Himalayan Frontal Thrust System. A fault line is a crack in the Earth’s crust where massive tectonic forces build up pressure over time. These invisible lines are where the Earth quietly stores energy—until it suddenly doesn’t. It’s the reason Nepal is so earthquake-prone.

Main Frontal Thrust (MFT), which runs north of the plains at the foothills of the Chure, parallel to the East-West Highway, is responsible for earthquakes, including the ones in 1934 and 1988, and 2015.

 

 

For instance, it took 700 years for a powerful quake of magnitude 8 to erupt in eastern Nepal with the epicentre in Okhaldhunga, infamously known as the 1934 Great Nepal-Bihar Earthquake, which claimed approximately 16,000 people across Nepal and India, with over 10,000 lives in the former.

Meanwhile, seismologists continue to sound the alarm. The 2015 earthquake, they say, was only a partial rupture—meaning much of the tectonic pressure beneath Nepal remains dangerously intact. Kathmandu sits squarely in harm’s way, vulnerable to both fringe shocks and a potentially devastating megaquake. 

Scientists have also identified a seismic gap stretching from west of Gorkha to India’s Dehradun, untouched since a magnitude 8 quake struck Lo Mustang in 1505. That silence, they warn, isn’t reassuring — it signals a build-up of pressure that could trigger a far more destructive disaster than 2015.

As alarming as it sounds, they warn of a pent-up tectonic pressure underneath—a mega earthquake, one that could have a resounding impact, much larger than the 2015 earthquake.

Progress rising on shaky ground—

At the 2015 earthquake’s epicentre—Barpak, the entire village was buried, with 78,074 private buildings damaged in Gorkha. Post-reconstruction, Barpark lost its picturesque charm—its stone buildings and stature as a living museum of Gurung culture to concretisation, reported the Nepali Times in 2018.

As concrete became the ultimate preferred safety standard, the concretisation has swallowed other disaster affected parts of the country too.

In Kathmandu Valley—one of the most vulnerable regions in the event of another big earthquake, whether it strike closeby or in the western region—private buildings have continued their sprawl to the heights of Buddhanilkantha and Nagarkot in the north and Ramkot and Chandragiri in the west, to the lengths of Dhulikhel in Kavrepalanchok in the east. The valley counted some 514,542 private buildings based on the 2021 National Census, nearly 80% of which are residential.

Experts say the country has made strides in making construction resilient to earthquakes. According to Urban Planning and DRR Expert Deepak Shrestha, many of the buildings that collapsed in 2015 were very old, and weak at foundation.

“Whatever destruction and damage happened was quite a controlled one, courtesy of the building code introduced after the 1988 earthquake. Yet, the 2015 destruction was a wake-up call to modify for the better.”

However, construction without soil testing could be risky, he added. “Soil bearing capacity of the valley is low, rendering the foundation weak.” The land subsidence case of the under-construction Summit Apartments in Lalitpur adds to his words. A 2019 study suggested that a geotechnical investigation is necessary before constructing a building in the valley.

Public buildings mandatorily require soil testing. And private buildings meant for commercial use usually do it to ensure resilience. But private residential houses rarely do that, he said, putting them at risk.

Newly built structures following the Nepal National Building Code, 2020, can stand earthquakes unless the epicentre is the faultlines underneath created by the 2015 earthquakes—Thankot Active Fault and Chitlang Active Fault, said Shrestha. 

While some poorly constructed structures survived the 2015 earthquake, they would not endure future disasters of equal magnitude, said Civil Engineer and Construction Industry Expert Amar Adhikari.

The depth of the epicentre, or focal depth, and the wave direction of the quake are equally responsible for determining how disastrous another earthquake would be in urban centres of the country.

Mud walls, mountain risks, and missed lessons

While urban centres grapple with the problem of poor urbanisation and unchecked concrete expansion, the country’s public infrastructure and mountain and remote regions face an entirely different challenge.

Despite mandatory soil testing, the situation remains alarming for public infrastructure, which includes schools and hospitals. Only 9.4% of them are safe, says a 2023 Structural Integrity Assessment of 29,000 public buildings across 145 municipalities of the country by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA). Over half of them need major strengthening, 12.5% retrofitting, 12% immediate demolition, while 5% are located in poor soil.

When the 2015 earthquake struck, many experts pointed out that the number of casualties, especially among the children, could have been much larger had it occurred other day than Saturday.

Similarly, houses in remote hilly and mountain regions are traditional mud-and-stone lacking reinforcement and modern building codes and built in unstable ground conditions. About 81.4% of the buildings in Karnali are death traps—highly needing disaster-resilient reconstruction, including that for earthquakes, warned the former NDRRMA chief Anil Pokhrel in an interview with the_farsight last year.

The Jajarkot Earthquake in 2023 was a harsh exposure of this vulnerability. Despite a relatively moderate magnitude of 6.4, the impact was disproportionately high, with 157 deaths and nearly 27,000 houses fully damaged. Just eight years after the devastating 2015 earthquake, it exposed the country’s progress in disaster preparedness, failing to account for varied socio-economic and geographic conditions and vulnerability of the country, including Western Nepal’s sensitivity.

Similarly, when the Gorkha earthquake occurred, mountain and remote communities faced a cascade of other disasters. The earthquake had set off an avalanche in the Everest region, killing over 20 people. In Langtang Valley, it triggered a large rock-ice avalanche and an air blast disaster, killing over 350 people, and continued dry landslides.

Strained systems, stalled reforms

These events raise urgent questions about the country’s disaster response capabilities—especially its ability to juggle overlapping crises. Can teams trained to pull survivors from crumbled concrete also respond to flash floods or avalanches, all at once? This was put to test in the last September floods and landslides that claimed 200 lives and caused extensive damage in the country’s capital city.

There is some respite, though. Unlike in 2015, when the country was developing its constitution and the central government was clueless in coping with the aftermath, with its approach limited to distributing post-disaster relief, there is now a constitution and local governments in place.

The Constitution enlists disaster management as a prerogative of local governments, while the federal and provincial governments have concurrent roles—providing necessary technical and financing resources, explained Pokhrel. Additionally, there is significantly more experience and expertise in disaster response, thanks in part to the hard lessons from the 2015 earthquake.

However, few critical factors remain unchanged: the political stalemate, weak disaster leaderships and a fragile economy—all of which are crucial in the country’s ability to prepare for and respond to disasters, followed by reconstruction.

Political stalemate continues to delay key institutional and legal reforms, and sufficient budgetary allocations. In the recent past, successive home ministers Ramesh Lekhak, Rabi Lamichhane and Narayan Kaji Shrestha have failed to demonstrate decisive leadership when dealing with a recurring crisis such as wildfire, which is now a yearly reality.

While the state appeared empty with the victims of the Jajarkot earthquake with delayed assistance and dependence on foreign humanitarian aid for relief, recovery and rehabilitation—USAID announced $1.37 million, and Japan allocated $1.7 million. 

Similarly, BP Highway, considered an engineering marvel in the country’s road infrastructure, is estimated to incur a reconstruction cost of NRs 27 billion, for which the government is now seeking a grant or concessional loan from Japan, which originally built it and also repaired post-2015 earthquake.

The point is: as disasters are becoming increasingly complex and routine, the country’s economic capabilities have been unable to keep pace with evolving challenges. A big-big earthquake would not only strain the already stretched resources—it would overwhelm them entirely. 

Nepal has been warned. The next time, it won’t be a drill.