Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of questions raised about safety of travelling in Bhutan, given the recent (including today) earthquakes in Nepal. These are valid fears for a travellers, who is on a holiday, these fears have been heightened, especially after the dreadful pictures that have emerged from Nepal, of the devastation over the last 2 weeks.
Given where the epicenter of the recent earthquakes have been, closer to the center of Nepal, we in Bhutan have been lucky that we were about 500 km from the epicenter, this is about the same distance as Allahabad is from the epicenter. Therefore, while we felt the earthquake there have not been any fatal casualty or even reports of single injury. There has also not been any reports of building being damaged in Bhutan.
Another information that may be on interest to our guest is that for the last 10 years our Government has been sensitizing the people of Bhutan about the danger of earthquake and also implementing very stringent regulation while constructing buildings. Therefore over the last few years whenever there has been an earthquake the damages in modern building has been very minimal as when the earthquake struck Sikkim a few years ago in 2011. In the 2011 Sikkim earthquake the damages in Bhutan had mostly been in the rural areas, in building built in the traditional methods.
So that brings us to a questions, that our guest have asked us repeatedly. Can we assure that there would be no earthquake during their visit! The answer is fairly straight forward, No we cannot guarantee that there will be no earthquake. What we can assure our guest is that in the event there was an earthquake the building which houses Hotel Norbuling was retrofitted in 2013 to be earthquake resistant. Therefore we are confident that you will be relatively safe with us.
We would like to request our guest to keep in mind that the Himalayas are an earthquake prevalent zone and therefore it is normal to have earthquake on a regular basis and most earthquake are off very low magnitude and can barely be felt. The large earthquake as we have seen in Nepal recently are very rare. Scientist who study earthquake expect the gap between major earthquake to be between 80 to 100 years and therefore the risk for another major earthquake is very rare.
We hope we have been able to answer the question our guest have asked and we also hope to see you in Bhutan soon.
