Many city streets in Kathmandu are one lane wide and flanked by masonry buildings four stories high. There is no building code, and the typical structure is made with no attention to engineering. One-seventh of Nepal's Gross Domestic Product comes from foreign aid. The average Nepalese earns the equivalent of less than forty cents a day. This city with the romantic name may be the world's worst place to be during a big earthquake—although many others in South Asia have high seismic hazard levels too—and there is no comprehensive plan to deal with the next one.

Some foreign aid money has paid for a National Society for Earthquake Technology in Nepal. That group arranged for a small California nonprofit, GeoHazards International, to come and assess the situation. (The head of GeoHazards, Brian Tucker, was recognized in 2002 with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.) GHI's evaluation of what another quake like 1934's would do is numbing—

• More than half of the city's bridges would be heavily damaged.
• The entire water system, sewer system, telephone system, and electric power system would be disabled.
• Six in ten buildings would be seriously damaged. The city has seven fire engine brigades.
• The homeless would number somewhere around seven hundred thousand.
• Deaths would number somewhere around forty thousand. The dead in Nepal are usually cremated. Each cremation uses more than a ton of wood.
• Injuries would number in the hundreds of thousands. Kathmandu has about 2100 hospital beds in twelve hospitals. Half of these would be unavailable due to damage. Kathmandu has 700 doctors.
• The airport is almost surrounded by land subject to liquefaction. This would seriously hamper the arrival of outside aid.

As so often happens, the chosen leverage point for action is the schools and the kids. The first Kathmandu Valley Earthquake Day took place January 16, 1999, on the anniversary of the 1934 quake. The Prime Minister told the press, "I still recall the deadly tremors. I was a little boy then. We were in our school ground. . . . The Earth began to shake and the commotion kicked up dust that covered all of the sky."

January 16 now marks the annual Earthquake Day as part of the Asian Urban Disaster Mitigation Project. Schoolchildren assemble and hold drills. Public awareness is raised, and the awesome task of beginning to safeguard Shangri-La takes another baby step. Safer school buildings may help more Nepalese to survive to adulthood and tell their cautionary tales to new and better prepared generations. Follow the activities in the Nepali local press.

The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau behind them are the world's largest topographic feature. Besides exerting a profound influence on global climate, this part of the Earth's crust has some remarkable examples of extreme tectonics.

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