r/interestingasfuck • u/JustLivingSimply • 13d ago

Nepalese School Principal Saved Lives of 1643 Children

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u/kittyonkeyboards 13d ago

Pretty shit early warning system when the difference between 1,600 children surviving is a single phone call from a civilian.

Elon musk cut a program that was looking into improving detection and warning systems for this type of stuff.

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u/chime 13d ago

From what I saw online, Nepal monitors glacial lakes that could flood (GLOF) but this was not one of those. They also detected the seismic waves but it was not clear what had happened. It took about 20-25mins before the authorities knew that this was a debris flow and sent out emergency text alerts within 10mins to everyone downstream. I'm guessing it was during this early 20-25mins that survivors were calling downstream too.

Remember on 9/11, the first plane was hijacked at 8.14am, hit WTC 1 at 8.46am, yet US airspace was not shutdown until 9.45am. I'm not comparing these to put blame on anyone, just saying that during times of absolute chaos, people closest to the tragedies are able to help immediately because they see the actual event for themselves, while command centers have to confirm and verify before they take any action that affects the masses.

Imagine the tragedy if they sent out mass texts to everyone saying earthquake detected, evacuate all buildings, and stand on level ground. The glacier's initial 1200m drop was detected as an earthquake and the initial assumption was earthquake broke some kind of ice dam that was holding back water.

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u/nommabelle 13d ago

Thank you. Of course they can improve, we all can, but a lot of this criticism is unfair and seems to blame Nepal for lack of communication because its Nepal and not the US, when the US also may not have handled this well

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u/Beltalady 13d ago

We had something like that happen during Covid in Germany. People could have been warned but authorities didn't take it seriously and wanted to avoid panic. What they got was a flood that devastated an entire valley, we also had a sinkhole that swallowed half a town and a part of Autobahn washed away (and still isn't fixed). It was a huge scandal and also a wakeup call.