ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
November 5, 2018
Deaths spark calls in Nepal for better warning systems
By Binaj Gurubacharya
The Associated Press
ATHMANDU, Nepal — The
bodies of five South Korean
climbers killed in a fierce storm in
October on a mountain in Nepal were sent
home amid calls to improve weather
warning systems on Nepal’s mountains.
Mountaineers and officials gathered at
Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital
in Kathmandu offering flowers and
burning incense by the bodies, which were
kept in wooden coffins. The bodies were
driven to the airport and flown to Seoul,
South Korea’s capital.
Officials said they would push the
government to improve the weather
warning systems to prevent disasters and
minimize loss of lives in the future.
“Every time there is a disaster on the
mountain, we all seek ways to prevent
these deaths, but soon we forget about it,”
said Santa Bir Lama, president of the
Nepal Mountaineering Association. “We
are going to ask the government to install
equipment to warn about weather
conditions on the mountain.”
The five South Koreans and four
Nepalese guides died when they were
swept by a storm on Gurja Himal moun-
K
tain’s base camp. Rescuers only reached
the area a day later and took two days to
have their bodies recovered and brought
back to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.
Lama said there are some weather
forecast systems in use, but those are all
concentrated on Mount Everest, the
world’s tallest peak.
Gurja is not one of the region’s tallest or
more popular peaks. The last time
climbers were known to be on the
mountain was eight years ago.
“I am going to take the initiative and
demand the government install these
weather warning systems on smaller
mountains,” said parliament member
Rajendra Prasad Gautam.
Among those killed was Kim Chang-ho,
the first South Korean to summit all 14
Himalayan peaks over 26,250 feet without
WITHOUT WARNING. A man offers flowers
on coffins containing bodies of South Korean climbers
killed in a fierce storm on Nepal’s Gurja Himal moun-
tain after they were brought to the Tribhuvan University
Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. The bodies of
the five climbers headed home amid calls to improve
weather warning systems on Nepal’s mountains.
(AP Photo/Bikram Rai)
using supplemental oxygen.
Mountaineering friends who gathered
at the hospital said Kim was a good person
and an expert climber who was looking for
adventure and challenges.
“He was always looking to discover
routes that have not been explored and try
new things on the mountain,” said a
Nepalese friend, Ang Dorje, who Kim had
promised to meet after returning from the
mountain.
“He did not want to do what others did.
He was a pure adventure seeker who loved
the mountains and adventure,” said Loben
Sherpa, who helped Kim during his many
trips to Nepal’s mountains.
It was the deadliest climbing disaster in
Nepal since 2015, when 19 people were
killed at Mount Everest base camp by an
avalanche triggered by an earthquake that
devastated the country. The previous year,
an avalanche above Everest’s base camp
killed 16 Nepalese Sherpa guides.
Chilling phone video shows passengers boarding fatal flight
By Stephen Wright
The Associated Press
AKARTA, Indonesia — Like untold numbers of
spontaneously shot smartphone videos, Paul
Ferdinand Ayorbaba’s most recent was not a work
of art, full of the backs of heads and the constant bobbing
and disorientating pans and zooms that are a signature of
mass digital culture.
But its mundane details have been transformed by
tragedy into something deeply chilling — the last images
of some of the 189 people who perished in terrifying
circumstances little more than an hour after the video was
shot.
Just minutes after takeoff, their Lion Air flight plunged
into the Java Sea, tearing apart the plane and the people
in it.
Ayorbaba travelled frequently within Indonesia on
business and the boarding video was perhaps meant to
comfort his wife, Inchy Ayorbaba, who felt a little anxious
about the trip to an outlying island he’d never visited.
“It was his last contact with me, his last message to me,”
she said in an interview with Indonesian TV at a police
hospital where she’d taken their three children for DNA
tests to help with victim identification.
The images in the short video are familiar not just to the
millions who have passed through the Indonesian
capital’s well-worn domestic terminal but to anyone who
has taken a flight.
At the beginning, there’s a semi-orderly queue of people
showing their boarding passes to a waiting attendant.
J
Suddenly it dives into an extreme close-up of the pass in
Ayorbaba’s hand, showing his name and the flight
number, JT-610.
Next, a jerky view of a bright wide concourse and the
backs of people walking ahead, pulling their wheeled
carry-on bags.
Then a sudden swerve into a narrower passage from
where the tarmac and waiting planes are visible through
slats.
Ayorbaba zooms to a waiting red and white Lion Air
plane, pans to another Lion Air jet in the distance, and
LAST LOOK. A rescuer shows passports recovered from the area
where a Lion Air plane crashed, at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indone-
sia. Passenger Paul Ferdinand Ayorbaba’s smartphone video, taken while
boarding the plane, shows the last images of some of the 189 people who
perished. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)
then back to the boarding stairs attached to his flight. A
woman wearing a bright hijab reaches the top of the stairs
and disappears inside.
About 35 minutes before takeoff, Ayorbaba uploaded
the video to his wife using the instant messaging app
WhatsApp, a timestamp shows, she said.
She first saw the message when she woke up at 6:30am
but didn’t take in the video’s details and went back to
sleep. Within a minute of that moment, the plane began a
rapid dive that ended in the sea northeast of Jakarta.
It was about 9:00am when Ayorbaba heard news of a
Lion Air plane that crashed en route to Pangkal Pinang in
the Bangka Belitung island chain.
“I went back to watching the video,” she said. “I saw his
boarding pass he showed in the video. I started to believe
he was in that crashed plane,” she said. “I kept calling
him, sending WhatsApp messages, hoping that he didn’t
go, or something made him cancel his trip but there was no
answer.”
Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini contributed to this report.
Melting glacier in China draws tourists, climate worries
Continued from page 2
Mountain Glacial and Environ-
mental
Observation
Research
Station, part of a network run by the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Nestled into a suburb of Lijiang,
population 1.2 million, the station is
home to Wang and his team: geologist
and
drone
operator
Chen,
postgraduate glaciology student
Zhou Lanyue, and electrical engineer
Zhang Xing, a private contractor.
After breakfast, the team heads off
by van for the day’s mission. A cable
car carries them up to a majestic view
of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
The team shuffles past a line of
tourists — many in red ponchos, most
sucking oxygen canisters, a few
vomiting from altitude sickness —
before descending to replace a broken
meteorological station.
The team operates remote sensors
that collect data on temperature,
wind speed, rainfall, and humidity.
Other sensors measure water flow in
streams fed by melted ice. Cold
temperatures,
downpours,
rock
slides, gales, and glacier movement
break the equipment.
“It is not easy to encounter good
weather here,” Wang said.
This weather will ensure Yunnan
has plenty of freshwater while other
glacier loss poses serious risk of
drought across the Third Pole, he
said.
The next day, the team wore
crampons while repairing more
sensors scattered across the glacier’s
crags.
“Where we’re at right now was back
in 2008 all covered with ice,” Wang
said. “From here to there at the side,
the glacier shrank about 20 to 30
meters. The shrinking is very
remarkable.”
The team forded streams and
jumped crevasses in search of long
iron bars they previously embedded
in the ice. GPS tells them how much
the bars, and thus the glacier, have
moved. They also measure how much
height the glacier has lost during the
summer.
Back on the viewing platform, Che
launched a buzzing camera drone
over the white expanse. The
photographs help tell a story of
staggering loss. A quarter of its ice
has vanished since 1957 along with
four of its 19 glaciers, researchers
have found.
Changes to Baishui provide an
opportunity to educate visitors about
global warming, Wang said.
Last year, 2.6 million tourists
visited the mountain, according to
Yulong Snow Mountain park
officials.
On a blustery day recently,
hundreds of tourists climbed wooden
stairs through grey fog to snap selfies
in front of the glacier.
Hou Yugang said he wasn’t too
bothered over climate change and
Baishui’s melting. “I don’t think
about it now because it still has a long
way to go,” he said.
To protect the glacier, authorities
have limited the number of visitors to
10,000 a day and have banned hiking
on the ice. They plan to manufacture
snow and to dam streams to increase
humidity that slows melting.
Security guard Yang Shaofeng has
witnessed a warming world melting
this mountain, which his local Naxi
minority
community
considers
sacred.
Yang remembers being able to see
the glacier’s lowest edge from his
home village. No longer.
“Only when we climb up can we see
it,” he said sadly, as tourists lined up
to have their names engraved on
medallions bearing the glacier’s
image.
The etching is already outdated.