The State Department abandoned eighty-five American pilgrims in a Nepali valley to a glacier.
The Kailash Journeys agency says four hundred Americans took its pilgrimage tours this year. Every one of them was of Indian origin. The State Department knew the cohort was coming. American consular teams had already done advance reconnaissance on the hospitals along the route, in anticipation. A U.S. diplomat in Kathmandu told the Wall Street Journal that foreign missions were expecting exactly this kind of American traffic — Indian-Americans, mostly, with a lifelong dream of laying eyes on the mountain and dipping into the waters of nearby Lake Manasarovar.
There is a Hindu temple two hours south of here, in Madison, and another up in Wausau. The buses were mostly leaving from temples like those. I know because the farm-supply store where I get my Stihl parts is the kind of place where the Indian-American families who moved into Adams County in the last twenty years send their teenagers for summer jobs, and the parts counter is where you hear what’s coming.
The flood came down the valley at Gyirong Port, the immigration point between Nepal and Tibet, last week. Experts believe a chunk of glacier and the bedrock underneath it detached from a Himalayan peak and plunged four thousand feet into the valley below. Ice pulverized into water on impact. The water picked up debris. The debris became a tsunami of mud. Footage from the port shows the wave doing its work in seconds — buildings swallowed, people carried. Archana Suresh, the forty-six-year-old telecommunications engineer from Murphy, Texas, who cooked meals for the homeless in her spare time, and her husband Raghu Rajan, fifty, were last tracked by mobile location in the vicinity of that port, getting ready for breakfast. Their tour group had included six other Americans.
Most American travelers do not have overseas medical insurance. Suresh worked at Verizon. Her employer’s health plan almost certainly did not cover a medevac from Kathmandu. A medevac from Nepal to a United States hospital can run fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars, depending on the aircraft and the patient’s condition. Travel-insurance policies often exclude “acts of God” or specifically exclude geological events. The forty-six-year-old wife who cooked meals for the homeless in her spare time was probably insured by her employer. She was almost certainly not insured for a glacier. The same is true of most of the families on those buses. The same is true of most rural American families who book international travel through a tour operator that bundles the hotel and the bus but does not bundle the medevac.
The State Department has a Bureau of Consular Affairs. The Bureau handles thousands of consular-assistance cases every year — Americans who die abroad, are arrested abroad, are hospitalized abroad, need help abroad and cannot get it from any other federal agency. It is the institution that stands between an American family and a foreign-government bureaucracy when the worst happens. It is not an evacuation service. It does not run search-and-rescue. It coordinates with foreign governments. It relays information between the family and the embassy. The Bureau’s job is to be the paperwork in a crisis. When the crisis is a glacier flood that took a hotel in seconds, the paperwork is the only institution standing between the family and the mountain.
The Himalayan glaciers have been retreating for thirty years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented the loss for two decades. The rock-ice avalanche that killed those families is the kind of hazard the retreating glaciers make more common — bedrock that was held in place by cold ice for centuries lets go when the ice lets go. The Science paper that put the Northern Hemisphere lake-ice trend on the map — Magnuson and his coauthors in two thousand — used Lake Mendota as one of the long reference series. The lake behind my property goes out eleven days earlier than it did when I started keeping the notebook twelve years ago. The physics is the same on a different scale. The Indian-American families on the buses were not warned about that geology by the tour operator, by the travel-insurance industry, or by the State Department. The tour operator and the State Department have access to the same literature the IPCC has. They did not pass it on.
When eighty-five Americans disappear abroad, the institution that catches the family is the same institution that catches a family here when a kid goes missing in the Wisconsin River. The church basement fills up. The Lions Club does a pancake breakfast. The fire department starts a collection. The Adams County Times-Reporter runs the photograph. Nobody waits for the institution to do the work, because the community is the only institution small enough to recognize the family.
The Agrawal family in New York — Rekha Shashidharan, fifty-four, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Rashi — were last heard from at 7:30 a.m. local time, at a hotel near Gyirong Port, due to cross into Tibet that morning for the start of the Kailash circuit. Roughly an hour later the hotel was washed away. Their niece Srishti Agrawal told the Journal that Nepali contacts have been sending the family photographs of bodies in the hope they can identify the two; the images, she said, are horrific. Rashi had recently asked her aunt about career paths. Rashi said she did not want to be a lawyer because she could not see herself defending criminals. The girl was fourteen.
The eighty-five families deserve rescue, recovery, and a fast accounting of every missing American. They also deserve the recognition that the institutions that should have warned them, insured them, and evacuated them did not do the work. Travel insurance that excludes the disaster the destination is named for is not insurance. A State Department that knows the cohort is coming and has no plan for them is not protection. A tour operator that bundles the bus and the hotel and the mountain but does not bundle the medevac is selling a ticket, not a pilgrimage. The mountain is rock and ice. The next bus will roll into the same valley under the same conditions unless somebody names the gap.