Shortly before noon on 25 April 2015, an enormous earthquake shook Nepal. With a magnitude of 7.8, it was the worst to hit the country for more than 80 years, its epicentre 50 miles north-west of the capital, Kathmandu. Two weeks later, a second huge earthquake struck.
The power of the quakes and the aftershocks devastated the country – almost 9,000 were killed, many more were injured and 893,000 homes were damaged or flattened. Avalanches were triggered in the Himalayas and in the Langtang valley an entire village was wiped out by a mudslide.
Over in the UK, Jo Read, a water engineer, knew she could soon be heading out to the crisis-hit country. Read, who works in the private sector and whose background is in water supply and flood defence, is on call one month a year with the charity Red Cross. She is part of an emergency response unit, a small team of trained professionals who can be deployed quickly. “You have to be ready to go in 24 hours’ notice,” she says.
“When the earthquake happened, the Brits and the Spanish [Red Cross] were selected to do the emergency sanitation response. The charity does rotations so the first team went out in May and did a month, and the second team went out in June and did a month.” The third team, Read’s unit, was put on standby as they waited to hear if they would be needed. “In the end I had a week where I knew definitely I was going.”
They flew out to Kathmandu on 28 June 2015, and had security briefings at the charity’s headquarters, before travelling east to the town Chautara, around a three-hour drive from the capital. The town is located in Sindhupalchowk, a mountainous district with villages built into the hillsides which was among the areas worst-affected by the earthquakes. Read’s unit, based in Chautara, was working across two sub-districts, which together had a population of around 10,000.
“Where we were working about 95% of the houses were completely destroyed. You couldn’t see any houses, it was just piles of rubble. Everything was rock construction, often without mortar, so it crumbled in the earthquake.”
Following a handover with the team they were replacing, Read went to survey some toilets that were being built in a camp where around 300 people had been relocated. The camps were a last resort for people – most tried to stay next to their homes, building shelters from rocks and plastic sheeting. “Most people who had the capacity to stay where they were, stayed where they were. The camp was full of the most desperate people,” says Read.
There were fears in Nepal that, in the aftermath of the earthquakes, poor sanitation and contaminated water could lead to major outbreaks of water-borne diseases, such as cholera, which is endemic in the country. People no longer had access to toilets and in the temporary camps, which had no sanitation facilities, hygiene was also a problem.
“The aim of our emergency response unit is to reduce the risk of outbreaks and the spread of disease,” says Read. “Any activities that lead to that end was our brief. In Nepal that consisted of building latrines, temporary latrines in camps but also out in the community where people were staying by their houses. And also advising on drainage in the camps because stagnant water can become a breeding ground for mosquitoes and lead to malaria outbreaks.”
Read oversaw a team of 12 people from the local area who were constructing the toilets. They weren’t particularly qualified in construction, however. “It’s a small town, you’re not going to find big contractors,” says Read. They had worked with the first emergency response unit on a design for the latrines that used locally-available materials, that would be easy to construct and that people would want to use.
The community helped them find wood or bamboo that they used for the hut structure. They used plastic sheeting for walls and the roof. Read’s team had also brought some materials out with them from the UK, such as plastic slabs to go over the holes.
A team of two or three could build a double latrine in a day. Read’s role was to manage the construction team, making sure the latrines were being built in the right areas and the constructions were secure. “When you’re trying to build loads really quickly, you just have to be careful. You have to be aware of the ground conditions – are they going to change if it starts raining? Are the materials strong enough? The last thing you want is someone using your latrine and it collapsing.”
While her focus was on the construction, the other half of the emergency response unit was responsible for promoting the importance of hygiene. In countries where people don’t use toilets it can be a difficult task to encourage behaviour change. However, this wasn’t the case in Nepal, says Read. “In Nepal people were used to using latrines, they often had their own septic tanks. But they had been destroyed in the earthquake.”
Getting drinking water to people was also a priority. The earthquake had damaged the water networks that collected water from springs and piped it down to villages. “Because the land had moved, a lot of the pipes were broken. While we were there the government was fixing the pipes to get the systems back up and running,” says Read. In the meantime the Red Cross was carrying out temporary water trucking, collecting water in trucks, chlorinating it and transporting it to villages.
Read’s job was full of challenges. There had been landslides, which had cut off areas, and there was danger of more. “You’d sometimes have to walk for an hour over rubble to reach certain sites, it slowed everything down,” she says. They were mindful of not missing any communities.
The steep terrain also posed problems. “Everything was cut into mountains, you were always going directly up or directly down.” It could be tricky finding places to put the community latrines where the pits weren’t at risk of collapsing due to the thin layer of soil on the slopes. (They tackled this by using wood to reinforce the pits).
Managing a team of workers who were traumatised by the earthquake also needed to be sensitively handled. If someone didn’t show up one day or was acting strangely it was probably because they had lost relatives or their house.
Read was moved by the community spirit of local people. “People were so giving and really wanted to help their community.” One of the construction workers, a quiet man who was older than the others, stands out. “He was badly affected. He was a really hard worker, he was quick and would get everything done to a high standard. In the last weeks I was there, he came over and said, could we come to his area and put a latrine there? It turns out we had missed his area. He’d been working so hard for us for three months, and been so selfless. I said, ‘Of course!’”
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