On August 16 a glacial lake on Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, burst through its banks and flooded the tiny village of Thame, which has about 300 people, many of them Sherpas (mountain guides).
Thame is part way up the mountain at 12,467 feet, just about the limit of how high humans can live comfortably without supplemental oxygen. The village is located in the country of Nepal.
Sixty people were put out of their homes by the shock flood, which leveled at least a dozen houses and a hotel, plus a schoolhouse and a health clinic. Now the villagers are wondering if it’s safe to continue living there. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured, thanks to an effective early warning system, and the fact that the lake breached its banks during daylight hours.
Ang Tshering Sherpa, the former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, said that the whole village might have been killed if the emergency had occurred at night.
Local resident Yangji Doma Sherpa said townspeople are “still crying” when they talk to each other and debate whether to go back to their homes. Many people who live in Thame have been there for their whole lives since birth. They’re now seeing the beautiful mountain lake as a danger.
While Thame was the hardest hit, the flood affected people living farther down the mountain in other villages. Tok Tok village, which takes two days by foot to climb down to from Thame, was partially swept away, according to resident Pasang Sherpa. The river flowing down the mountain is usually “milky and frothy,” he said, but after the flood it turned dark brown and sent debris and boulders barreling down the side of Everest.
Pasan Sherpa said he was still “shaken” because the event was so loud, unexpected, and frightening. He’s living in a separate village and does not know whether he will be willing to return to Tok Tok.
Not many of these villages are well-prepared to handle such disasters, according to scientists. Lakes in danger of flooding are not regularly monitored, and many villages have basically nothing in the way of disaster or evacuation plans.
This is not the first time such an incident has occurred in Nepal. Over the past five decades more than a dozen glacial lakes have burst, and four of them have been in or near the river basin where the recent Thame flood occurred.
The damage to the landscape from such floods, as well as the shifting of glacier boundaries, can sometimes trigger deadly landslides.
