Open gallery
From the Penn Law Journal Fall 2015 issue.
Andrew Towne L’15, WG’15, an inveterate mountain climber and adventurer, has scaled some of the world’s highest peaks. Last April he intended to take on Mount Everest and got more adventure than he had bargained for, surviving a catastrophic 7.9 earthquake in Nepal that triggered a massive avalanche that buried part of the base camp in which he was situated. This is his harrowing account.
April 25
First, there was the earthquake.
It felt like I was sitting on the edge of a large trampoline as somebody else jumped on the middle. It was disconcerting to have something I took as stable my whole life begin to move underneath me. I never knew how much I had taken for granted stability in the very ground that we live on. My first thought: what if the earthquake destabilizes the glacier under our feet, opening up a crevasse? The Khumbu glacier must be hundreds of feet thick under basecamp, and it can be hard to discern its faults and seams from the surface. Moments later, the threat from above became clear. We heard rumblings above us in all directions, and as I panned my gaze to the north, I saw it — a cloud of snow and ice almost a quarter mile high rushing toward us from the north. Avalanches are common around basecamp, but none are big enough to threaten the camp. This one looked different. I didn’t know where to go, but I wanted to be able to see the hell that was about to rain down on me, so I stayed outside. I thought about the likelihood that the plume might carry rock and ice chunks and assumed the fetal position behind a medium sized boulder, hoping it might act as a shield from any flying debris. I put my elbows by my sides and my fists against my forehead, hoping that might create an air pocket, should a blast of snow cover me. I started breathing hard, waiting to feel the snow to start burying me, so that I could take one last monster gasp. In retrospect, putting my face in my jacket might have 1) reduced the likelihood that my mouth and nose filled with snow and 2) increased the likelihood that I would have an air bubble to breath.
When I stood up, I had about 3 inches of snow on me but nothing more. I was lucky. Our expedition leader quickly confirmed that all of our International Mountain Guides (IMG) team was accounted for, and the next thing I heard was a discussion between our leader and the Himex team about which of our camps would serve as the most logical hospital, since the volunteer Himalaya Rescue Association (HRA) hospital at the center of basecamp had been destroyed. They agreed that IMG was easier to access, and we began to clear our communications tent and our dining tents for casualties. Within an hour, they started to pour in — some walking, most carried. The first role I assumed was that of a traffic cop, helping to direct casualties to the right tent. Soon, the doctors needed supplies to use in treating the patients, bedding them, and keeping them warm. I helped collect Nalgene water bottles for use as hot water bottles that patients could clutch, and I led a group of people to neighboring camps to find more sleeping bags and foam mattresses, after we had donated our own.
More camps and their doctors arrived, and soon there were multiple large medical kits. Once we were sure there were enough sleeping bags, pads and warm water bottles to go around, I started looking for ways to be helpful inside the patient tents. At first, this meant helping to distribute food, water and trash bags, but before I knew it a doctor asked for help setting a splint on a patient who had either fractured or broken his femur. The next patient had compound fractures in both of his legs; when we lifted up the sleeping bag covering him we saw both of his legs at right angles to where they should be when he was lying on his back. He received a heavy dose of pain medication and we wrapped both of his legs to two hiking polls, using sections of foam sleeping pad to insulate the legs from the polls and bandages.
We moved to the next dining tent, where my first task was to help prevent a gentleman’s toes from developing frostbite. He had broken his pelvis, shattered the bones in his hand, and dislocated his elbow, and the bandages around his legs were so tight that his feet had gone numb despite having dry socks and a heavy sleeping bag around them. He was grateful for the foot massage and hot water bag I gave him and was surprisingly lucid and understanding, given his severe injuries. The final gentleman I helped had approximately a 3-inch cut across his forehead which went down to his skull, and my responsibility was to help clean up his face after the doctors had bandaged his gash. He, too, was remarkably kind and maintained a sense of humor as I cleaned his face. He kept saying in broken English “I look good, yeah?” He even fell asleep with a smile on his face.
By the time I was done cleaning him, the doctors had finished their second sweep of that tent, so we cleaned up and made sure the patients had everything they needed for the night. By this time it was approaching midnight — the earthquake had struck just over 11 hours earlier. The doctors suggested there was nothing more we could do until the sun came up and helicopters began the medevac, so I went to sleep after checking in one last time in the head trauma tent.
April 26
I awoke at 6 a.m. to the sound of the first helicopter, and remarkably, no additional patients had died during the night.
By 6:15 I was helping move patients to the helipad. This required a bit of coordination, as there weren’t enough stretchers to go around, and one doctor was keeping a master list of patients in rough order of urgency of evacuation. I felt useful going between the four tents, finding the specific patients who needed to be prepped for each subsequent helicopter and helping to move them to the landing pad we had built at the edge of our camp. By late morning, all of the casualties had been transported to the next closest Himalaya Rescue Association hospital in the town of Pheriche 16 miles down the valley, and within a couple of hours we learned that an MI-17 chopper had carried them all safely to Katmandu. This was good news, because the earthquake had knocked down one of the walls of the Pheriche hospital and they were not equipped to handle the 25 to 40 patients who had come their way.
With the injured evacuated, we began to clean camp. Within an hour, there was a 20 foot area outside of the head trauma tent littered with blood soaked sleeping bags, water bottles and soiled clothing and bandages. I helped sanitize our dining tents, first sweeping them and scrubbing the floor mats, then cleaning the blood off of the tent walls. We did our best to protect and respect the deceased until they could be properly buried. By noon, the camp was beginning to look like normal, except for the piles of debris and the large stockpiles of medical equipment.
While all of this was happening, one of our IMG guides and a team of Sherpa went into the icefall to check its condition to see if the climbers at Camp I and Camp II had a chance of climbing down on their own. A number of ladders had fallen down and the camp of the “Ice Doctors” — the elite team of Sherpas who create the route through the icefall each year — had been destroyed, so the conversation quickly turned to helicopter evacuation of Camps I and II. Located at 20,000 and 21,000 feet, Camps I and II can only be accessed by custom helicopters and incredibly talented pilots.
Almost exactly 24 hours after the initial earthquake, we got the first major aftershock, measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale. As before, we had just sat down for lunch in our newly cleaned dining tent, and as before, we all ran outside to watch for avalanches. It was much cloudier that afternoon, and so we could hear new avalanches coming, but couldn’t see them. Finally, we saw the tail of one running down the Khumbu Icefall from the direction of Camp I. This second earthquake had little impact on base camp, but we later learned that it worsened the condition of the icefall and badly damaged the village of Pangboche about half way down the Khumbu Valley. We learned that the second earthquake was particularly terrifying for Camp I because they heard avalanches in all directions but couldn’t see anything. Luckily, no one on our team (and I believe no one on the mountain) was hurt by that first major aftershock. Helicopters couldn’t fly the rest of the afternoon, so we relaxed a little bit and began to prepare for the following morning.
April 27
At 6 a.m. that morning, the clouds lifted and the helicopters were able to begin carrying down all of the climbers and Sherpa from Camp I and Camp II. After somewhere north of 50 helicopter sorties, each carrying 1 to 2 passengers without gear, we learned that everyone on the upper mountain had been brought down to safety. These evacuations didn’t require nearly as much base camp manpower as did loading the sick the previous day, and so a group of us hiked over to the remains of the Himalaya Rescue Association hospital to help them dig out the rest of their equipment.
The wreckage around basecamp was phenomenal. The first destroyed tent was about 100 yards from my tent, and by the time we had walked 200 yards from my tent we were in the epicenter of the destruction. As we dug out the hospital, we discovered tents buried by multiple boulders the size of mini-fridges, and we could only imagine the impact caused by such objects falling from thousands of feet above.
By early afternoon, about 50 hours after the initial earthquake, all of the seriously injured had been medevaced and all climbers from the upper slopes of the mountain had been brought to safety. Finally, we could relax a little bit and digest what we had just been through.
Our expedition leader brought us all together to announce that our expedition was officially over; the earthquake and avalanches had destroyed much of the route through the dangerous icefall and many of the Ice Doctors we depended on had either been killed in the avalanche or had left for home after their camp was annihilated. That, plus the risk of further aftershocks and avalanches and the need for many of our Sherpa teammates to go back to their villages to take care of the earthquake damage there, made the decision quite simple. Our team spent the next day packing and was fortunate to be able to spend a few days during our hike back to civilization in the village of Phortse, helping a few people begin to rebuild their homes.
The mountain reinforced in me two lessons I had learned long ago: that mountaineering is dangerous, even with the best preparation, and that the mountain will decide if and when we can climb. So many things from the experience I will never forget: the selflessness and emergency management skills of our IMG team and the doctors who flooded our camp; the resilience and perseverance of the patients who remained calm and even expressed gratitude throughout our best attempts to treat them; the willingness of everybody to pitch in — whether they were clients or guides or Sherpa, and whether they were helping by treating patients, keeping the stoves going, managing logistics, or donating their only sleeping bag to the victims; the building international aid effort for the people of Nepal, and particularly the thousands killed, injured and suffering in Katmandu. I truly believe that international responses to tragedies like this get better as the world becomes smaller and people are better able to empathize with one another. And nothing builds cross-cultural understanding quite like teenage intercultural exchange. I could not be prouder to have been on Everest on behalf of Youth For Understanding (YFU) Intercultural Exchange, and I could not be more grateful for the support to YFU from so many, particularly Scheels Sports, Casual Adventure, Happy Harry’s, and Ag Warehouse.