An Ignoble Experiment: After the flood, families seek answers

They were building infrastructure in Nepal. Their families in China want to know what happened to them

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Nepal Army/handout/Reuters

By CNN staff

She kept calling and calling – countless times – but her husband never picked up.

The woman, who CNN has given the pseudonym Lili, said her husband had spoken with a friend at 8:27 a.m. on Wednesday. That was roughly 10 minutes before an enormous landslide careened down a mountain in Nepal, generating an explosive flood wave that ripped through a border area with China and continued into Nepal.

Lili hasn’t heard from her husband, who was working on a Chinese construction project in the South Asian country, since.

Hers is one of many families across China desperate for information about loved ones who were in the area when disaster struck, including dozens of Chinese nationals who are believed to have been working across the border in Nepal.

Now, these families are wondering whether rescue efforts in Nepal are reaching their loved ones – and are urgently calling for more proactive updates on the progress of those efforts from within China.

Himalayan building spree

Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images

Last week’s deadly flooding has put a sharp spotlight on how risks from natural disasters in the Himalayas are growing, at the same time as countries in the region are rapidly building out their high-altitude infrastructure footprints.

There’s no indication that the latest disaster, which has killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands more missing in both Nepal and China, was linked to manmade development.

But the devastation could be a reality check for governments driving a boom in dams, tunnels, highways, railways and bridges across the Himalayas – which is acutely vulnerable to earthquakes, natural hazards and climate change – as they aim to harness the region’s vast hydropower potential and resources.

No country has marshaled those efforts like China, where the government sees Tibet, and its Himalayan borderlands, as critical to its national and energy security.

Beijing aims to transform the region into a high-altitude green energy powerhouse, with projects that include a $168 billion megadam, currently under construction, that could stretch the limits of what human engineering has achieved.

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