Khumjung Water Supply
Project details
In 1963, Sir Edmund Hillary's school-building expedition laid a pipeline bringing water down from Khumbila, the sacred mountain above Khumjung, to a new reservoir built in the village. The same expedition, funded largely by a US$52,000 donation from World Book, also built new schools at Thame and Pangboche that season. Khumjung, at 3,780 metres in the Khumbu region of Solukhumbu, was already home to the first Himalayan Trust school, built two years earlier in 1961.
That 1963 season turned into something bigger than planned. Partway through, Sir Ed's party was asked to help a dying child and found a smallpox outbreak spreading through the district. He radioed for an emergency vaccine airdrop from the checkpost at Namche, and within a week more than 3,000 people had been vaccinated. Sir Ed later said the vaccinations, not the schools or the pipeline, were what people appreciated most, and the experience pushed him toward building a permanent hospital, which opened at Khunde three years later.
Water reached Khumjung by pipeline for the first time in 1963, carried down from its source on Khumbila, the sacred mountain that rises directly above the village, to a new reservoir built in Khumjung itself. It was laid during the same school-building expedition, funded chiefly by a US$52,000 donation from World Book, that put up new schools at Thame and Pangboche that same season. Khumjung, at 3,780 metres in the Khumbu region of Solukhumbu, already held a special place in Sir Edmund Hillary's affections: he later wrote that Khumjung and neighbouring Khunde had reached most-favoured status because so many of his expedition Sherpas came from there.
The 1963 season became something larger than a building programme. Partway through, Sir Ed's party was called to see a dying child and found a smallpox outbreak already spreading through the district, carried in by a porter on an earlier expedition. Sir Ed radioed the army checkpost at Namche for an emergency vaccine airdrop, and within a week more than 3,000 people had been vaccinated, limiting the outbreak to a few dozen cases and about twenty deaths. Of all the programmes carried out on the expedition, schools, waterworks, medical clinics and the like, he wrote afterwards, the one most widely appreciated was undoubtedly the vaccinations, and this hadn't been part of his original plans. That realisation is credited with turning his thinking toward a permanent hospital, which opened at Khunde three years later, in 1966.
The 1963 pipeline shows how hard it is to keep water running on the flanks of Khumbila. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, UNICEF attempted a separate pipeline across the same mountain, intended to carry water to both Khunde and Khumjung over a few kilometres of exposed precipice. A doctor working at Khunde Hospital at the time predicted it would take eighteen months to build and another eighteen before an avalanche destroyed it. Instead, the pipeline was swept away and abandoned within a year, far sooner than even his pessimistic prediction.