After the flood: Nepal’s ongoing rescue

At 8:37 on the morning of August 26th, a collapsing glacier and ice-rock avalanche crashed into a valley in Tibet and dammed the Lende River. Three minutes later, the dam breached. A torrent of water, rock, mud, and ice surged down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli Rivers in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, reaching speeds of up to 180 kilometers an hour. One local, Shibo Giri, watched the wave sweep away an entire suspension bridge at nine o’clock that morning. He escaped into the forest, slept in a cave, survived on collected rainwater and pig berries, and was picked up by an army helicopter the following afternoon. He is one of the lucky ones.

Nearly a week on, the scale of the disaster is becoming clear. Around a thousand people have lost their lives. Roughly 4,000 remain missing, including almost 600 foreigners. Entire villages have been swept away. The morgues are overrun with mangled bodies. It may become the deadliest flood in Nepal’s history, and it is already one of the costliest natural disasters the country has seen in modern times.

A country caught between geography and climate