Life Along Pakistan's Mountain Highway Where China Is Investing Billions Of Dollars

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World
Life Along Pakistan's Mountain Highway Where China Is Investing Billions Of Dollars
December 14, 2019

The Karakoram Highway revamp is a key part of China's trade and infrastructure initiative in the region, and local communities' expectations are high.
Diaa Hadid/NPR

Much is expected of Karakoram Highway, which curls through the tall mountain ranges of northern Pakistan, reaching western China. Both countries are renovating it, seeing its potential as a trade route. Pakistan also views it as a way to consolidate control over territories contested with India.

But for some of the 500-mile route, it is barely a two-way road, carved out of the rock face that slopes sharply into valleys below. It is battered by rockfall, floods and earthquakes. A landslide in 2010 blocked a river and drowned about 14 miles of the road. In heavy snowfalls, the road all but shuts down.

A cargo truck lies flipped on a hairpin turn on a far northern section of the Karakoram Highway near the border with China. Pakistan and China say it will become the first part of a trade corridor from western China to the Arabian Sea. But the road is often narrow, clings to steep slopes and is battered by landslides and floods.
Diaa Hadid /NPR

The riskiest part is the last stretch to China. "We can actually call this part of the road as a museum of geohazards," says Sarfraz Ali, a geologist who studies the impact of climate change on the highway at Pakistan's National University of Sciences and Technology.

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