Proximate disaster

A blizzard and several avalanches in the Himalayas in central Nepal are reported to have killed more than two dozen people

HimalayasWhen I read about wildfires in San Diego County, California, or flooding in Mecklenberg County (Charlotte), North Carolina, I contact the appropriate sister to check out if she’s being affected. Usually, the answer is no, though one year, a fire was uncomfortably close.

They do the same for me. Flash floods five miles from Albany made the national news, but the actual storm missed me.

I was thinking about this because my friend Karen, who I’ve only known since 1958, has been in Bhutan and Nepal. Cyclone HudHud created some landslides in Nepal. So when we heard that a blizzard and several avalanches in the Himalayas in central Nepal are reported to have killed more than two dozen people, her friends, including me, were concerned.

She explained on Facebook(!), where I purloined her picture, that, according to the local paper The Himalayan, “rescue missions are underway on Huinchili,” one of the mountains visible to her on the trek. Fortunately, she went no higher than 7000 feet; she did have to endure hiking uphill for six hours in “incessant raw rain.” But the snow was at much higher elevations, causing the avalanches.

Some guy in Albany riding a bike got shot, apparently in the head, at 9:40 a.m. on Thursday. I found this more than a little unsettling. When I started riding my bike to the choir that evening, I realized that I just didn’t want to be out; totally irrational, I know, but nevertheless true.

Mistakes were made in treating Ebola in the United States. The second nurse who got infected should not have been allowed to fly. I’d bet money, and I seldom do, that at least one of the two US nurses who got infected were exposed when they took off the protective suits.

But all the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, that he, e.g., wanted the disease to come to the US to get back at white people shred both common sense and common decency.

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