‘Swept away’: Nepal families search for relatives after devastating floods

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.

“Our teachers were shouting for us to leave,” he recalled, speaking to Al Jazeera on the phone. “Some of us took a small old bridge and crossed to a safer area, while most of the students took up to the hills. Some of the students also had panic attacks and fainted.

About 180 people have been killed and at least 1,400 people are missing in a vast region spanning Nepal and Tibet in China, after a suspected glacial lake outburst upstream in Tibet caused a massive flash flood that swept away entire settlements and even dams in the way. 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.

“Till early this morning it was very scenic around here. There were houses and horticulture gardens here. There was a hydropower station and plant. Everything has been swept away,” Poudel told Al Jazeera.