KATMANDU, Nepal — A blizzard and avalanche in Nepal’s storied Himalayas climbing region have killed at least 20 people, nearly half of them foreigners, in the midst of the October trekking season, district officials said Wednesday.
Dozens were reported missing.
The death toll eclipsed the last major mountaineering disaster in the Himalayas, when 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche six months ago on Mount Everest, the worst climbing calamity in Everest’s history.
Related: On Top of the World
The Sherpa strike must have been broken.
It was believed that as many as 200 trekkers were caught by the latest weather, which began bearing down on the Himalayas on Tuesday, part of the stormy aftermath of a cyclone that ravaged India’s eastern coast two days earlier.
Related:
"A powerful cyclone pounded a large swath of India’s eastern seaboard with heavy rain and strong winds on Sunday, killing at least eight people and causing major damage. Cyclone Hudhud had winds of 120 miles per hour when the edge of the storm hit land after sweeping through the Bay of Bengal, Rear Admiral S.K. Grewal, the chief staff officer of India’s Eastern Naval Command, told reporters....
The naval base bearing the brunt of the storm was left out of the rewrite.
Rescue workers and soldiers cleared uprooted trees and electrical poles blocking roads in eastern India on Monday after a tropical cyclone killed at least 24 people and demolished tens of thousands of mud huts. As weather improved, the air force used planes and helicopters to drop food packets in affected places in and around Visakhapatnam, the city hit worst by Sunday’s severe cyclone, said a statement by India’s Home Ministry. Weather forecasters warned that heavy rainfall would lash parts of six states as the remnants of the cyclone moved further inland....
The death toll from the powerful cyclone that ripped through the eastern coast of India rose to 25 on Tuesday, with most of the deaths caused by falling trees and collapsing buildings, according to a government official in Andhra Pradesh. The devastation was particularly acute in the port city of Visakhapatnam, where the eye of the cyclone passed Sunday, and where 15 people died. Nearly 400,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, though a relief official in Odisha said Tuesday that most people there had returned to their homes. In Visakhapatnam, roughly 120-mile-per-hour winds had mangled and destroyed electric and telephone poles."
Just cycling through my Globes.
While 22 people were rescued Wednesday, heavy accumulations of snow — more than 2 feet in some areas — forced the Nepal army and police to suspend further rescue actions until Thursday.
The army, guided by trekkers they had rescued, recovered 12 bodies near Thorong La, a pass along a popular trekking circuit, according to the Mustang chief district officer, Baburam Bhandari.
The dead included two Israeli tourists and two Poles, as well as eight Nepali trekkers who were trapped in a blizzard.
In Manang district, four Canadians and one Indian trekker were buried in an avalanche along the mountain pass.
Their bodies will take days to dig out of the snow, said Devendra Lamichhane, the chief district officer in Manang.
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"A sudden blizzard, a lengthy ordeal" by Bhadra Sharma and Ellen Barry | New York Times October 17, 2014
KATMANDU, Nepal — Freezing, exhausted, and blinded by snow, Yakov Megreli, an Israeli medical student, had a few minutes to make a choice.
He could spend the night shivering in a flimsy wooden tea stall with a few others, as snowdrifts crept up the walls outside and began to fall in through cracks. Or he could press forward into the blizzard with a large group of trekkers headed toward town and led by the tea shop’s owner, who promised to help them to safety if they each paid him 1,000 rupees, about $10.
Megreli, 24, cannot quite explain why he stayed behind in the wooden shack, but that is probably why he was alive Thursday, a survivor of the worst trekking disaster to hit Nepal’s Himalayas in recent memory.
He and about a dozen other hikers, mostly young Israelis and Germans, spent the night lying on top of one another, trying to fight off hypothermia by sharing body heat and talking about anything they could think of to keep from falling asleep. But they were a small group. The rest of their group, some 40 to 50 young people, “decided to go to Mukhtinath,” he said, in an interview from a hospital in Katmandu. “And we don’t know what happened to them.”
And all likely Jewish.
About 350 hikers were going across the Thorong La pass on Tuesday when a ferocious, lashing surprise snowstorm — part of the aftermath of a cyclone that ravaged India’s eastern coast — closed in on them, burying their legs in snow and making their progress down the steep path to safety agonizingly slow. Of those, 244 reached their destination, according to Ramesh Dhamala, chairman of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal.
The bodies of seven trekkers, six of them visitors from other countries, were retrieved Thursday, according to the association, bringing the number of dead to 27. Many more bodies had yet to be retrieved, presumably buried in snow along the path.
Harry Dahal, a director of Swissa, a tour agency that caters to Israeli trekkers, said that about 100 of his clients were planning to cross the pass on the day of the storm and 40 were still missing.
Nepal’s army and police began rescue operations after dawn Thursday. More than 60 people were delivered to safety, and dozens more were believed to have taken shelter at a lodge near the pass, said Gopal Babu Shrestha, an official with Trekking Agencies.
Meanwhile, dazed survivors were arriving in Katmandu’s army hospital.
“It was a terrible experience,” Megreli said. “It seemed that everything was fine. The weather was fine. The trail was not so hard. Until the storm.”
The Annapurna Circuit, as the trekking path is called, is a popular route. Those crossing the pass often stay overnight in lodges that offer thick blankets, yak-dung fires, and simple foods such as rice and soup, said David Ways, a travel writer who has made the journey twice.
In October, there would have been little worry about stormy weather, and for the days that led up to Tuesday, Dahal said, “there was not even a drop of cloud in the sky, it was all blue sky.”
Members of the Israeli group had just crossed the pass and were beginning their descent toward Mukhtinath when the wind whipped up, lashing their faces with particles of snow and making it difficult to see, Dahal said. The path is both steep and exposed, offering virtually nothing that could serve as shelter.
I'm sorry such a thing happened to anyone; however, one can't help but think that God reached down from heaven to the highest point on earth to make a point about karma and Palestine.
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Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Let's face it: the propaganda pre$$ is written of, by, and for them.
There is no denying it, and it is the main reason they are imploding as an industry. Thank God they have hundreds of millions of dollars in American taxpayer kickbacks from Israel to $u$tain them.
