‘Nothing is left’: Eyewitnesses recall the horror of Nepal’s devastating flash floods

KATHMANDU: Giri Lal has been left with memories of his wife and four children after Wednesday’s flash floods swept through Timure, a border town in Nepal’s Rasuwa district.

The 38-year-old was among those caught in a disaster that unfolded with such terrifying speed that, for many who witnessed it, it felt like an earthquake.

The flash floods took away Lal's entire family - wife, two sons and two daughters.

Lal, who drives a truck for the local waste management office, is now undergoing treatment at a state-run hospital in Kathmandu - around 160 km from Timure.

The death toll in the massive flash floods in Nepal rose to 270 on Thursday, as rescuers raced against time to find hundreds of people still missing in one of the country’s worst disasters in recent years.

The flash floods struck parts of central Nepal on Wednesday after an ice-rock avalanche upstream blocked the Lhende tributary of the Bhote Koshi River, sending a debris-laden surge downstream. It first hit Rasuwa, near the Nepal-Tibet border, and eventually spread to other districts.

“We have been showing their pictures to people and asking if anyone has seen them,” Lipa Sapkota said, standing outside the emergency section of Bharatpur Hospital with a photograph of her brother, Sabi, missing since Wednesday morning.

“There were some dead bodies, but they were not easy to identify because of their condition,” Sapkota told the Setopati.com news portal.

For another eyewitness, the first indication that something terrible had happened came while he was having breakfast.

“I was at home this morning. While I was eating breakfast at around 8:40 am, news came that a flood had hit Timure. I heard people saying, ‘Timure is completely gone, nothing is left',” he told the Nepal News web portal.

“It felt like an earthquake was happening. It was impossible to figure out what was taking place. Right before our eyes, the market and the settlement were devastated,” he said.

Several videos emerging on social media showed buildings, people and animals being swept away by the several-feet-high torrent of mud and water.

The scale of the destruction became clearer as rescue teams moved into the affected areas.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) reported more than 800 people missing - at least 579 of them, officials said, were tourists.

Nepal Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said nearly 300 Indian tourists were among those missing.

Most of them, according to officials, were travelling towards Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet and Gosainkunda in Nepal.

The floods also damaged 35 motorable bridges, 45 suspension bridges and around 40 km of black-topped roads, mainly in central Nepal.