The US Military Knew The Nepal Earthquake Was Coming:
“Eight months ago, Marines and other American personnel were in Nepal alongside troops and civilians from around 20 other countries, all responding to a fake earthquake…….
The underlying story for the training program—nicknamed Pacific Endeavor 2014—describes the current, real situation almost to the letter.
The mock quake had a registered magnitude of 8.2, knocking out roads, bridges, power lines and sewage systems, official briefings explained. Aftershocks caused even more damage and delayed first responders.
A week after this fictional disaster occurred, emergency personnel had identified nearly 6,000 of the nearly 14,000 dead, according to one of the updates event organizers handed out during the sessions. “Morgues are not accepting bodies due to insufficient space.”
“Sixty percent of buildings in densely built-up areas are destroyed or unsafe,” a mock situation report added. More than a half a million simulated people were homeless.
In the real Nepal, more than 7,000 people have died and more than 14,000 have been injured in the actual earthquake. The disaster has forced more than three million Nepalis from their homes……
The Pacific Endeavor scenario has turned out to be almost disturbingly prescient.
The Pentagon didn’t just just randomly decide on this particular mock disaster storyline. For more than a decade, the international community has worried about what would happen to the mountainous South Asian country after a major seismic event.
In the last hundred years, earthquakes in Nepal have killed more than 27,000 people, Nepali authorities explained as American officers developed the final training plan. Over the past four decades, the same number of people died in more than 15,000 recorded natural disasters?—?including quakes and floods.
In 2012, the United Nations Development Program ranked Nepal 11th in nations at risk for major quakes, the representatives from Kathmandu pointed out in their briefing slides. “[The] World Bank … classifies Nepal as one of the global ‘hot-spots’ for natural disasters.”
Most notably, the Bihar-Nepal Earthquake destroyed a fifth of all buildings in the Kathmandu Valley and razed a quarter of the structures in the capital in 1934. In 1997, the U.S. Agency for International Development had even funded a study to see just how bad the situation would be if a similar seismic shock hit the country.
Two years later, California-based nonprofit GeoHazards International concluded that 40,000 people would die and nearly a million would be displaced by a equally massive earthquake…….
In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Army’s main headquarters for the Pacific region held two separate disaster preparedness drills of their own in Nepal. And along with the Marines, the Air Force participated in the 2014 iteration of Pacific Endeavor..”