KATHMANDU—The rains had briefly quelled, and beneath a bright mid-morning sky, 43-year-old Subash Tamang was working along the banks of the monsoon-swollen Trishuli River with his family. They were extracting sand, as they had done before, when the river suddenly rose to consume them.
Some 45 miles north, high in the Himalayas along the Nepal-Tibet border, a large section of a glacier had collapsed, sending a torrent of water, sediments, and boulders and swallowing downstream settlements. It took the flood barely 30 minutes to reach Tamang’s village in Nuwakot district, hitting with the terrible speed of a tsunami.
Tamang survived by holding on to a patch of weed. But it swept away his wife, his two brothers and their wives, and his elder sister. The body of one of his brothers has been retrieved, while the five other family members remain missing. Tamang was ferried to Kathmandu for treatment two days later.
“I’ve lost everything,” he said from a hospital bed. “We didn’t receive any warning and weren’t expecting the water to rise that high. One moment I was hanging by the weeds, and the next moment when I looked, none of my family members were there. I now have a hole in my leg and my heart.”
