Kommersant's piece on the Nepal flood is not reporting. It is a press review: four foreign papers set side by side under one headline about scientists trying to work out what happened. The Kathmandu Post from Nepal, NDTV from Delhi, The Wall Street Journal from New York, The Times from London. It was the second most-read item in Russia when we collected.
What the four are used to build is a cause. The leading hypothesis, from an initial reading of satellite data, is that a large piece broke off a glacier and slid hundreds of metres down into the valley, where the ice shattered and poured into the rivers below at enormous speed. Nepal's weather forecasting department, after meeting Chinese meteorologists, posted that on China's preliminary assessment there had been no significant rainfall or flooding on Chinese territory — a Chinese assessment, relayed by a Nepali agency, relayed again by Kommersant.
The Kathmandu Post's own reporting, which we read directly, puts it a step more concretely. An ice avalanche appears to have fallen into and blocked the Lhende river, holding water back until it burst downstream. That is the initial assessment of Rijan Bhakta Kayastha, a professor at Kathmandu University, based on preliminary findings and talks with scientists in both Nepal and China.
The editorial Kommersant reprints is about what should have caught it. This is the third disaster in the region in three years. A mechanism for cross-border information sharing between the two countries exists, the paper writes, but does not seem to work; flood water takes time to travel downstream, so there is room to save lives if word moves faster than water. A similar disaster happened in the same area last year, and a functioning early-warning system might have prevented at least some of the losses. Nepal contributes little to global warming and often suffers its effects.
One number in the Russian piece does not match the ones we have carried this week. Kommersant gives 800 missing and more than 160 dead. On our other boards this week the same event has been 472 and then 480 dead in the French accounts, 157 in the Nepal police figure an Indian paper used, and seven on China's own side of the border. Different hours, different things being counted.
Why it is on the board
Second on Kommersant's most-read list when we collected, and the top of the three clips in the Russian video lens is on the same subject — the causes of the sudden flood in Nepal.
Russia is reading the disaster through other people's newspapers. Our boards have carried it five times this week from four countries — France, India, China twice, and Britain today. This is the sixth, and the only one that is itself a compilation of other papers.
확인: Коммерсантъ · The Kathmandu Post