DUSHANBE, April 27, 2015, Asia-Plus – Reuters reports that a police official said on Monday that the death toll from Nepal”s earthquake has jumped to 3,218.
The official said 6,538 people have been injured in Saturday”s quake, the worst in the country in 81 years.
The 7.9 magnitude quake reportedly made it the worst such disaster to hit Nepal since 1934 when 8,500 died.
Meanwhile AFP reports a Kathmandu earthquake has long been feared, not just because of the natural seismic fault, but because of the local, more human conditions that make it worse.
Seismic activity can have bigger effects on different parts of the globe because of building construction and population, and that”s something the U.S. Geological Survey calculates ahead of time.
While the trigger of the disaster is natural — an earthquake — “the consequences are very much man-made,” seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England, was quoted as saying by AFP. “Except for landslides, which in this case are a serious problem, it”s buildings that kill people not earthquakes,” Jackson said.
