Durham earthquake team left Nepal two days before quake hit

Professor Alex Densmore and Dr Katie Oven, from the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University, are part of a five-year project to help Nepal and other countries along the Alpine-Himalayan belt prepare for natural disasters.

They spent a week in eastern Nepal visiting villages and working with local groups, before returning home last week; with Dr Oven the last to leave on Thursday, April 23.

Within 48 hours, a 7.8-magnitude quake had hit, killing at least 6,000 people.

Some areas still cannot be reached and the government has warned the death toll could top 10,000.

“I got a text message and turned on the news,” Dr Oven said.

“I thought: ‘Oh my goodness’. It was surreal to think I’d been walking down those streets just a few days before.”

“This is what we’d been thinking about and preparing for,” Prof Densmore added, having heard about the disaster through Twitter.

A Durham PhD student, Hanna Ruszczyk was still in Bharatpur, Nepal, when the quake struck and joined the relief effort before returning home this week.

In an email home, she wrote: “The continuing aftershocks are jarring and regular enough to keep my stomach in knots.

“The images on local and national TV are heartbreaking. I have stopped watching. I am too involved.”

Prof Densmore and Dr Oven said Nepal had taken steps in making itself more ready for an earthquake in recent years but remained underprepared in many ways.

They are now helping the response effort by trying to pinpoint the effects of the quake and share information, even with the most hard-to-reach areas.

Dr Oven said the disaster has set Nepal’s development back by “decades”.

Both plan to return to Nepal, although not immediately.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has launched an urgent Nepal appeal. To donate, visit dec.org.uk/Nepal

Volunteers can help map the damage by going to tomnod.com