Floods in Nepal's Gorkha District Sweep Away Homes and Bridges, Five Missing

The takes

• 

  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  After the Flood, the Bridges Come First

  Flash floods in Nepal have swept away houses, bridges, and a hydroelectric project; the first duty now is not grand design but the humble work of restoring the market’s arteries while keeping disaster merchants at bay.

  A landslide in Nepal’s Gorkha district, we are told, blocked the Budhi Gandaki River and sent a muddy torrent downstream. About a dozen houses, several suspension bridges, and part of a hydroelectric project — construction equipment and all — were swept away. Around fifty people were rescued from the riverbanks; two women and three men remain unaccounted for. Authorities speak of evacuation orders and missing hydrological instruments, and they compare this lesser surge to an earlier glacier collapse that killed more than a thousand. To a distant reader these are numbers and proper names; to those on the spot they are broken roofs, severed roads, and the sudden, sickening knowledge that tomorrow’s income has been washed away.

  Read the essay →
• 

  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  Floods in Nepal and the Terms of Political Trust

  When rivers in Nepal sweep away houses and bridges twice in a season, the water tests not only stone and timber, but whether political power is still held on the terms for which free men could ever have consented.

  The reports from Nepal are stark in their simplicity. A landslide in Chumnubri village blocked the Budhi Gandaki River; the backed‑up waters broke through and rushed downstream, sweeping away about a dozen houses, several suspension bridges, and damaging a hydroelectric project, carrying its construction equipment off like twigs. Around fifty people along the riverbank in Gorkha district were rescued by the army; two women and three men are missing. Heavy rains in late September had already brought floods and landslides that killed at least twenty‑one. And all this comes downstream of an earlier glacier collapse in August, whose flood killed well over a thousand and left thousands of souls unaccounted for. Nature here is not gently instructing, but violently examining, the commonwealth.

  Read the essay →
• 

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Nepal’s Floods Expose a State Built for Fair Weather

  When the same river drowns you twice, the storm is no longer an excuse but a verdict on your institutions.

  The Budhi Gandaki rises in the night, houses and bridges go down, a hydroelectric project is mauled, and about fifty souls are plucked from the banks by the army. Two women and three men are missing, and for now there are no confirmed dead. This is the effectual truth: wood, stone, steel, and human bodies thrown around by water that should have been foreseen and fenced. I learned long ago that sermons about nature’s fury console the pious but teach statesmen nothing. The river does what rivers do. What interests me is what men did before it rose eight or nine times over their heads, and what they do in the hours after.

  Read the essay →