Kathmandu, Nepal — It was a normal school day on Wednesday at Trishuli Secondary School in Nepal’s Nuwakot district when Gyan Deep Sapkota, a grade 11 student, suddenly heard his teachers yelling. Bidur, the city where the school is based, lies on the banks of the Trishuli river. A flash flood was barrelling down from upstream, where the river is known as the Bhotekoshi.
Some of the students also had panic attacks and fainted. Among the missing are police, government employees, hydropower engineers and Nepalese, apart from hundreds of foreign tourists in Nepal. By late on Wednesday, Nepal Police spokesperson Abi Narayan Kafle said that search and rescue teams had recovered 95 bodies.
But both the death toll and the number of missing are expected to rise significantly, as the water recedes and connectivity with the worst-hit regions is re-established. Senior superintendent Rajendra Prasad Dhamala, a police officer monitoring the search in the Bagmati province, one of the regions affected, said most of the bodies recovered were found in downstream areas. Many of those missing are Indian tourists who were heading to Tibet for the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, a major Hindu pilgrimage to a lake that is sacred to Hindus, Buddhists and Jains.
Healthcare worker Rajendra Poudel, a resident of Betrawati, a town in Nuwakot district, described apocalyptic scenes. There were houses and horticulture gardens here. There was a hydropower station and plant.
Everything has been swept away,” Poudel told Al Jazeera. This is heartbreaking; I am out of words.” Lal Bahadur Rai, another resident of Nuwakot district, said the floodwaters reached within 10 metres of his house. My house was just lucky,” he said.
There is also huge coffee farming here. All of it is gone now.” A statement released by Nepal’s Prime Minister’s Office said 19 vehicle bridges and 43km of highway connecting lower regions of the Himalayan nation to the affected areas have been swept away by the flood. The Nepali districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha and Chitwan have been kept under high alert, while authorities have urged citizens to stay far away from the rivers.
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