AIT’s Dr. Sangam Shrestha writes about the Nepal Earthquake’s impact on the water sector

The article has been published on the
IGES website. It presents facts and figures about the damage caused by
the earthquake, particularly the impact to the water sector, and makes
urgent recommendations for better water resources management in the
event of future disasters.
 
READ ARTICLE: http://www.iges.or.jp/en/commentary/201506_shivakoti.html
 
READ (BELOW) FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED BY
IGES:
 
Nepal 2015 Earthquake Reveals Need to Shake-up Water and Disaster
Management
 
5 June 2015
 
Nepal was rocked by two major earthquakes of magnitudes 7.8 on 25
April and 7.3 on 12 May, that resulted in more than 8,700 fatalities,
injured over 22,000 and damaged over 790,000 buildings, mostly in the
worst affected 14 districts, including the capital Kathmandu and in the
Western and Central regions.
 
The quake severely damaged water infrastructure and disrupted
water-related services such as water supplies and drainage,
hydroelectricity generation, and irrigation facilities. Moreover, there
is a significant danger of additional earthquake-related water problems
in the near to mid-term future because the quake also exposed unknown
geological hazards. Visible land fissures and widespread dry landslides
show that the earthquake has loosened Nepal’s relatively young, fragile
and tectonically active mountainous geology and left the affected areas
more vulnerable to future disturbances. Structural reforms of Nepal’s
water management are urgently needed, not only to deal with the
immediate water crisis, but also to prepare for bigger impending
problems likely to result from continued geological changes. These
reforms cannot narrowly focus only on water, but different policy areas
need to be linked together in order to promote disaster risk reduction
(DRR) and resilience building more broadly.
 
There are three major problems that need immediate attention: the
disruption of services related to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH);
the increased risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) in the
Himalayas; and the higher chance of landslides and flooding.
 
Access to WASH services is crucial to keep affected communities
healthy during post-disaster rescue, relief and rehabilitation.
Contamination of water sources, coupled with poor sanitation and
hygiene, could lead to water-borne diseases, such as diarrhoea, cholera
and typhoid. This was the case following the 2010 Haiti earthquake
where an outbreak of cholera claimed more than 8,900 lives out of some
738,000 infected cases. Huge amounts of funds were diverted to deal
with this secondary crisis alone and necessitated the implementation of
the National Plan 2012-2022 which cost an estimated USD2.1 billion. But
while cases on the scale of Haiti have not yet emerged in Nepal, the
danger of a sudden outbreak cannot be completely ignored due to factors
such as difficulty in reaching affected areas and detecting the problem
at the very early stages, an impending monsoon and Nepal’s poor track
record of controlling water-borne diseases in the past. In 2009, a
major cholera outbreak infected over 30,000 people and caused around
500 deaths in the mid-western Jajarkot district of the country.
 
Severe damage to the water supply and sanitation infrastructure has
also been reported. The extent of the damage is still unknown due to
communication difficulties, but already more than 130,000 cartons of
bottled drinking water have been distributed, signifying the urgent
need for safe drinking water in the affected areas. Furthermore the
earthquake could have unknowingly affected the hydrogeology and water
flow as natural water springs have dried up in some places and newly
appeared in others. It may take years to rebuild the disrupted WASH
services, especially in rural areas where access to clean drinking
water and sanitation was inadequate even before the earthquake. What
has become absolutely necessary is to put in place an effective WASH
strategy for post-disaster situations. This strategy should, at the
very least, consist of a surveillance system to detect an outbreak in
the early stages, as well as backup disease prevention and control
measures for emergency situations such as provision of health workers,
WASH toolkits, and supplies of medicines and vaccinations.
 
The risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) has also become a
major public concern after the earthquake. Earthquakes could easily
trigger these floods in the Himalayan region where glaciers are
retreating faster due to climate change, and the accumulation of melt
water has created high risk glacial lakes such as Imja and Tsho Rolpha
in the region near Mount Everest. No immediate GLOF risk was found by a
quick assessment done by a group of experts from the International
Centre for Mountain Development (ICIMOD) but the possibility of a GLOF
is real. The capability to conduct this kind of immediate assessment is
essential to prepare for risks, especially immediately after an
earthquake. For future planning, GLOF risk should be assessed not only
in relation to climate change, but also other possible triggers such as
earthquakes.
 
Widespread dry landslides are one aspect of earthquakes that has never
been seen before in Nepal (as opposed to common wet landslides that
occur in the monsoon season). Nearly 1000 landslides have already been
mapped by an international team of scientists. These landslides not
only destroyed man-made infrastructure and claimed the lives of many
people, but on 23 May, landslides also blocked a major snow-fed river –
the Kaligandaki in the Myagdi District. In just 15 hours, the blockage
rapidly developed into a potentially dangerous dammed lake, about 200m
high and more than a kilometre across. Fortunately, the lake drained
naturally and did not inflict a flash flood which would have been
catastrophic in the downstream areas. If a landslide were to occur in
the wet season, when river water levels are higher than normal, the
situation could have been even worse and possibly unmanageable.
 
Intense runoff during the monsoon season could easily trigger more wet
landslides and floods from the already destabilised mountain slopes and
loose top soils. It is therefore critical to have in place strengthened
DRR preparedness and response mechanisms before the monsoon touches
ground in Nepal in about a month time.
 
The Nepal earthquake should lead us to rethink the emerging dimensions
of earthquake hazards and their impact on water resource planning,
development and management. Nepal already has plans, such as the
National Water Plan 2005, in place for flood and landslide hazards, as
well as water sanitation and access, but these are not sufficient to
manage the new dangers revealed by the recent earthquake. The dangers
posed by the real possibility of similar future earthquakes needs to be
incorporated into the national planning process.
 
Here are some additional recommendations that the government agencies,
development partners and local communities should consider based on the
experience of the recent earthquake in Nepal:
 
1. Prioritise an emergency action plan to rehabilitate and reconstruct
water infrastructure:
 
The people and economy of Nepal depend heavily on water resources for
growing crops and generating hydro-power, among other things. The
government should place an interim emergency action plan that allocates
resources and mobilises human capital to rebuild and strengthen vital
infrastructure such as drinking water supplies, sanitation and drainage
canals, hydro-plants, irrigation facilities, and flood control
structures.
 
2. Incorporate the potential impacts of earthquake-induced
geo-hazards in ongoing and future projects for water resources
development:
 
Nepal is actively pursuing a policy to develop water infrastructure,
including hydropower plants, dams and irrigation canals. It should be
mandatory to consider earthquakes as a potential hazard, in the design
criteria for building water infrastructure, and to strictly implement
it. This would not only safeguard expensive investments but also, more
importantly, protect human lives and livelihoods.
 
3. Empower and actively involve government agencies to
strengthen their disaster response capacity:
 
Lessons from the Nepal earthquake should be used to improve the
country’s water resources planning to deal with future disasters.
Government agencies should actively engage affiliated bodies and
mainstream non-government development actors and local communities to
create a disaster-resilient system for water resources planning,
management and use. Strengthening financial, technical and human
capacities and decision-making roles within government would be an
essential first step.
 
Finally, it is necessary to prepare for the possibility of extremely
rare, but nevertheless highly destructive simultaneous occurrence of
multiple hazards. It was only a matter of luck that the earthquake did
not occur during the monsoon season, which would have greatly expanded
the scope of the damage. Japan also suffered from a “triple disaster”
from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (massive earthquake, tsunami
and nuclear meltdown). Nepal’s future DRR planning should also consider
ways to deal with the worst-case scenario of a combination of multiple
disasters, one amplifying the impact of the others, such as a
combination of earthquake, monsoon flood and GLOF.
 
(Authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the valuable inputs
and support from Daisuke SANO, Mark ELDER, Augustine KWAN, Henry
SCHEYVENS, Tetsuo KUYAMA and Emma FUSHIMI)