Earthquake 2015, Nepal : This house (which survived 1934 earthquake 8.4 RS ) belonged to my father. This house used to be called YAMI CHHEN (Yami House ). Among the visitors in this house were Pandit Rahul Sanskrityan who has written biography about my father. He had stayed in our house for a month. Rahuljeee had traveled from India to Lhasa with my father and used to live there together. Dr. Ambedkar who too had stayed in our house during his visit to Nepal.
My mother late Heera Devi Yami, a freedom fighter to overthrow Rana regime of Nepal and the founder member of Nepal Woman Association, used to take charge of everything including managing the finance for the family from renting this house. Every time she ran short of money she used to add rooms (concrete structure over very old traditional building materials as per the advice of old traditional builders of Nepal for cleaner space etc ) and earn more from the rented rooms in order to educate her seven children and manage the house.
She had always kept my father totally undisturbed with house hold tensions so that he could devote all his life for the development of Nepal, continue with his passion in writing books and delivering lectures in public programs both in Nepal and India. However, she died in 1970 at the age of 49.
The 25th April 2015 Nepal earthquake (also known as the Gorkha earthquake) killed nearly 9,000 people and injured nearly 22,000. It occurred at 11:56 Nepal Standard Time on 25 April, with a magnitude of 7.8 R scale. Four people (tenants) in the ground floor got buried and died in our ancestral building at (Budhankhel , Ward no. 18 ) in Kathmandu.
April 25th earthquake tilted one neighbor's building almost near full collapsing state. Continued aftershocks throughout Nepal at the intervals of 15–20 minutes, with one big shock reaching a magnitude of 6.7 RS on 12th May at 12:54:08 NST brought down this building which fell into our compound This house was bought only couple of months ago by that owner. As of 7th June 2015, over 304 aftershocks had occurred. The large number of aftershocks after the earthquake is considered normal by seismologists.
I’m trying to show my experience we went through while the earthquake took place. This is the photograph of my house. it is five Story building after the first attack of the earthquake on 25 th April 7.9 Richter scale the building came down.
However the portion of the area where four of our tenants were taking lunch died. Over their dead body, interiors of all five floors of western section of the building had collapsed. Every one though they fled the place to some safer localities. After few days, the spot started smelling. When all the rubbles were removed, they found the entire one section of the five-story building had come down on their bodies. They could not open the door. Unfortunate the latch of the door was buckled because of earthquake and all four were found dead in a single heap with their hands hanging into the buckled latch. it seems they were struggling to open the door and because of the latch being jammed they couldn’t come out. This was a very unfortunate incident that took place in our house. The two children were teen agers.
My elder brother Vidhan (lung cancer patient) was on the third floor. He along with his wife, his daughter and son luckily had minor injuries. Because he was a civil engineer, he quickly managed to select the area that was structurally safer and all four of them survived with minor injuries
On 1st of May 2015 again there was an earthquake of 7.4 Richter scale. The remaining portion of the house came down. Unfortunately, one of our neighbor’s house, which was tilted due to earlier earthquake on 25th of April, came down flat on our compound shaking the locality with big bang dangerous noise. The vireo created from the photograph shows the rubbles of all the broken pieces of concrete that came down flying into our compound. These pieces of concrete blocks blocked the road stopping access to large number of houses because there was nobody available to clear off these concrete rubbles