The 2014 Everest Avalanche — Sixteen Nepali workers killed, and a mountain shut down

Summary

At about 6:45 on the morning of 18 April 2014, a serac broke from the western shoulder of Mount Everest and crashed into the Khumbu Icefall at roughly 5,800 metres, killing sixteen Nepali mountain workers — the great majority of them Sherpas — in what was then the deadliest single day in the mountain's history. The dead were not paying clients but the local staff who do the most dangerous work on Everest: ferrying loads, fixing ropes and breaking trail through the icefall before dawn, when the ice is most stable, so that fee-paying foreigners can climb later in the season. No foreign climber was killed. Thirteen bodies were recovered within two days; three were never found, entombed in the moving ice.

The avalanche struck a section of the icefall known to guides as the "popcorn field," below Camp 1, where a column of climbing Sherpas was carrying gear up the route in the pre-dawn cold. The released serac was enormous — later estimated at tens of metres thick and many thousands of tonnes — and there was no outrunning it. Twenty-five men were caught; sixteen died, several more were injured, and the survivors carried their dead and wounded down through the same lethal ground they had just been climbing.

What followed made 2014 a turning point as much as a tragedy. In the days after the avalanche, Sherpas at Base Camp, grieving and angry, refused to continue working for the rest of the season — partly to honour the dead and partly to protest the pay, insurance and treatment of the men who bore the mountain's worst risks. The Nepali government's initial relief offer of about 40,000 rupees (roughly 400 US dollars) per family, barely the cost of a funeral, deepened the outrage. By late April nearly all the season's expeditions had been abandoned, Base Camp had emptied, and the climbing of Everest from Nepal had, for that year, effectively stopped. The dead are named below; they were the centre of this event, not its background.

Timeline

The most dangerous commute on the mountain

The Khumbu Icefall is the first great obstacle on the standard South Col route up Everest, a chaotic, slow-moving cascade of broken glacier between Base Camp and Camp 1, riddled with crevasses and crowned by unstable seracs — ice cliffs the size of buildings that can collapse without warning. It is the most feared section of the lower mountain, and it is crossed not a few times but dozens of times each season, almost entirely by Nepali staff. Long before the clients begin their summit attempts, Sherpas and other workers shuttle tents, food, fuel, oxygen and rope up through the icefall, building and stocking the higher camps. They do this work in the dark and the cold of early morning, when the ice is at its most stable, precisely because the danger is so well understood. The risk is not shared equally: a paying climber may pass through the icefall a handful of times, while the Sherpa carrying that climber's supplies may pass through it twenty or thirty.

That imbalance is the economic logic of commercial Everest. A Sherpa climbing guide could earn on the order of 125 dollars a day and perhaps 5,000 dollars in a season — many times Nepal's average income, and reason enough for skilled men to take work they knew might kill them. The clients pay tens of thousands of dollars for the chance at the summit; the local staff make that chance possible and absorb most of the hazard. On the morning of 18 April 2014, a large group of Sherpas was strung out across the icefall on exactly this work — hauling loads toward Camp 1 through the "popcorn field" — when the mountain above them let go.

Seven minutes before seven

The serac that fell came off Everest's western shoulder, high above the route, and dropped into the icefall at around 6:45 in the morning. It was a vast mass of ice — by later estimates dozens of metres thick and weighing thousands of tonnes — and it swept down across the line of climbing Sherpas with no time for anyone beneath to escape. Twenty-five men were caught in the avalanche's path. Sixteen were killed outright or buried beyond reach; others were injured, some critically. The survivors, themselves shocked and hurt, began at once to dig for their friends and to organise the evacuation of the wounded, while helicopters flew in to lift casualties off the glacier. Within about forty-eight hours, thirteen bodies had been recovered. Three men — buried under many metres of ice and snow — could not be reached and were left where the mountain had taken them.

The sixteen who died were Nepali working men, most of them ethnic Sherpas, and naming them matters because the original frame of Everest news so often does not. They were Mingma Nuru Sherpa, Dorji Sherpa, Ang Tshiri Sherpa, Nima Sherpa, Phurba Ongyal Sherpa, Lakpa Tenjing Sherpa, Chhiring Ongchu Sherpa, Dorjee Khatri, Then Dorjee Sherpa, Phur Temba Sherpa, Pasang Karma Sherpa, Asman Tamang, Tenzing Chottar Sherpa, Ankaji Sherpa, Pem Tenji Sherpa and Ash Bahadur Gurung. They left widows and children in the Khumbu and beyond; several had families dependent entirely on the wages they earned in the icefall. No foreign client was among the dead — a fact that, more than any other, framed what came next.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Sixteen families lost their providers, three of them without even a body to bury, and the 2014 climbing season on the Nepalese side effectively ended. The disaster, and the work stoppage that followed, pushed the questions of Sherpa pay, insurance and safety from the margins of mountaineering into its centre. The mandatory insurance covering Nepali staff was subsequently raised, the government faced sustained pressure over relief funds and the share of climbing royalties returned to those who do the dangerous work, and the route through the icefall was later adjusted in an attempt to reduce time spent beneath the most dangerous seracs. The stoppage stands as a landmark assertion of agency by a workforce long treated as invisible.

Whatever reforms it produced, the underlying hazard did not go away. Almost exactly a year later, on 25 April 2015, an earthquake-triggered avalanche swept Everest Base Camp and killed even more people, surpassing 2014 as the deadliest single day in the mountain's history. The 2014 avalanche is remembered now less as an accident than as a reckoning: the moment when the cost of commercial Everest, measured in the lives of its Nepali workers, was named out loud, the dead were counted as the men they were, and the people who carry the mountain made plain that the climbing happens on their terms or not at all.

Lessons

References

• 2014 Mount Everest ice avalanche WIKIPEDIA
• Historic Tragedy on Everest, With 16 Sherpa Dead in Avalanche NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
• Mt. Everest sees its single deadliest day HISTORY