Loading...

So what happened in this case is that there was a depression over the northwest Bay of Bengal. And this essentially coupled with the site, you also had another tropical system form, Storm Shakti in the Arabian Sea. So these two systems interacted and their interaction essentially funneled a whole bunch of warm, moist air northward into the Himalayas. And of course once this really warm, saturated air hit the mountains, it lifted, it condensed between the mountain slope conditions, and all the dynamic forcing and hydrostatic effects, that sort of stuff. You had a blizzard develop, right? Plain and simply, you had a blizzard develop, right? And that's what happened. So it's sort of unusual to have, it's bad luck in a way since you had these two systems interact at this time of the year. It's not unheard of, it's just where everything culminated was right on Mount Everest or within the vicinity of Mount Everest. So of course all these people trying to climb to the summit or get up to base camp, they were in deep, deep trouble. And of course one of the compounding issues was that the heavy snow would also cut off road access, and there were tents that collapsed and things like that. So it was pretty insane. Some of the people that were in tents had to clean their tents every 90 minutes to prevent them from collapsing. So it was a pretty big deal. By about Monday, October 6th, they had 350 people that had been evacuated to the town of Kudang. And by the 7th of October, the remaining stranded people, about 900 of them had been evacuated. And of course at this point in time, one person was reported dead, and there were like 11 or 12 people that had some severe injuries from frostbite and hypothermia. So there you have it. If you want to go climb Mount Everest, just make sure the weather is in your favor.