In the winter of 2003, deaths in an avalanche of seven school children while skiing in the Roger Pass area in Western Canada revolutionised the concept of avalanche safety in the Canadian Rockies. Roger Pass is a narrow valley surrounded by mountains in British Columbia and prone to avalanches. On that fateful day in Feb of 2003, 17 people were caught in the avalanche including school teachers and students. Seven lost their lives. They had followed existing avalanche guidelines, and yet it did not save them.

Partly because this was an affluent private school, no effort was spared in investigating the accident. The good thing that came out of this tragedy was that it lead to a massive media blitz about avalanche safety in Canada. Among other things, more clear cut, easily-understandable avalanche warning systems were put into use cutting out difficult technical wording that the ordinary skier could not fathom. This did not mean that they cut out the "adventure" all together. For example, for those that considered themselves more experienced skiers who knew about avalanche safety, there were more elaborate warnings and recommendations.

Indeed as some Canadian avalanche experts will tell you, all of these activities over the years lead to more safety awareness about avalanches and prevented many deaths in the Canadian Rockies.

The other day after listening to these lectures on avalanche prevention and safety, I could not help think about the many preventable accidents besides avalanches that we face in Nepal every day. It took the Canadians seven deaths and they promptly fine tuned a system that was already in place and brought about important gains in accident prevention that saved live.

Here in Nepal, we bribe officials to build unsafe houses for ourselves. Despite an epidemic of road accidents nothing is done to improve road furniture and stricter licensing requirements. We continue to have people ride on the roof of buses. It took the tragic death of Pralad Yonzon to draw attention to the need for separate bicycle lanes in the capital, but possibly nothing will be done. All the aircraft investigation reports sit on shelves, none of the recommendations are ever implemented. Most of our diseases are water-borne infections, yet don't clean up our water supply. The list is long.