During the most recent monsoon, the area affected by landslides was about ten times greater than usual. The hilly terrain, severely weakened by the quake, is now more likely to slip after strong rains and aftershocks-a legacy that is likely to endure for years. And the destruction didn’t stop with the shaking (see ‘Deadly impact’). The earthquake unleashed more than 10,000 landslides that blocked rivers and damaged houses, roads and other key pieces of infrastructure across the country. The highway is not the only thing that keeps Amatya awake at night. “It was in frequent repair and closure even before the earthquake,” says Shanmukesh Amatya, landslide-division chief at Nepal’s Department of Water Induced Disaster Prevention in Kathmandu. The Arniko Highway, which runs through Kodari, is no stranger to such calamities, especially in the monsoon season. “It’s a good example of building a town in the wrong place,” says Kristen Cook, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, as she climbs over the rubble from one of the landslides that crushed the town. Massive boulders rest on the wreckage of homes. The road is littered with rusting cars and trucks smashed into bizarre shapes. One year after the magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people, the once-buzzing trade centre looks like a battlefield where armies of giants once waged war. Kodari is a ghost town on an empty Nepalese highway that cuts through some of the steepest slopes of the Himalayas.
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