A wall of water, ice and debris tore through Nepal's Rasuwa district on Wednesday morning, killing hundreds and erasing entire settlements along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys. Survivors are now recounting the minutes that decided who lived and who didn't.
A valley that disappeared in minutes
Before Prem Prasad Subedi could make sense of anything, his desk began to shake, he told Bloomberg. It was around 8 am on Wednesday, and the customs officer was going through routine paperwork at his office near Timure Bazaar, close to Nepal's border with the Chinese territory of Tibet. Within minutes, a chunk of ice had broken away from a nearby glacier, sending a violent surge of water, rock and debris crashing down the valley. Assessments based on seismic and satellite data indicate the collapse of glacial ice and underlying bedrock triggered a 5.2-magnitude seismic event before the wave hit.
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"At first we thought it was an earthquake, or rocks falling off the mountain above," Subedi told Bloomberg. "Or a flood? We were guessing." The wind hit first, he said, followed by vibration, a rumbling sound, and air thick with dust and water. His colleague, chief customs officer Rajendra Dhungana, said their outpost was barely 3 kilometres from the border. "When we went outside, we saw it coming so fast, with a very loud, rumbling sound," he told Bloomberg.
There was no warning that morning. Dhungana said Chinese authorities had sometimes alerted Nepalese counterparts when heavy rain raised flood risk in the past. "That day there was no message," he said.
The climb that saved them
As a wall of water roughly a metre and a half high closed in, the group ran for a mountain path 25 metres from their office, Subedi told Bloomberg. He fell as he fled, hitting his head, and pulled himself up by clutching trees. "Once we understood, we ran straight for the mountain," he said. "Those who managed to run within those 15 seconds survived."
Dhungana barely remembers the climb. "My heart said only one thing: run up. I don't even know how we got up there," he told Bloomberg. The group scattered as they scrambled higher, unsure where their colleagues had gone. "By the time we looked down, everything that was white had turned black," he said. "In that moment, we couldn't think straight at all." They kept climbing for half an hour, too afraid to look back, and did not stop until they were roughly a kilometre and a half up. Only then, Subedi said, did their chests loosen enough to breathe.
Of the roughly 15 people from his office and support staff still unaccounted for, Subedi told Bloomberg he believes most are dead. Some, he said, had shared tea with or played badminton alongside just 15 minutes before the disaster struck. "And within an hour, all of this happened," he said, speaking from Kathmandu after being airlifted out with Dhungana. Of their office, Dhungana told Bloomberg: "Nothing is left of our office. It used to look green and full of life — it was the smallest building there. Nothing left. Two structures are still standing, and nothing else."
"I never imagined I would get a second chance"
Down in Timure market, customs agent Raju Budhathoki was resting in his room when the hillside began shaking violently around 8:45 am, according to a report in The Kathmandu Post, cited by PTI. Believing it was an earthquake, he ran for a nearby police post, only to find officers themselves fleeing. He injured his hand scrambling over a wire fence but kept going, glancing back to see houses in the market being swept away one after another. He reached a forest about 500 metres uphill and survived. "From the forest, when I looked down at Timure, I never imagined I would get a second chance at life like this," he told the newspaper from his hospital bed in Trishuli. "Now everything feels like a terrible dream."
Fellow customs agent Prakash Gautam, also cited in the Kathmandu Post report, described a loud rumble followed almost instantly by darkness, a black cloud swallowing the sky above the market. "I ran out of my room without knowing what I was doing. I had no idea where to go or which way to run. I just wanted to survive," he said. From the forest, he watched bodies scattered and floating in the floodwaters below. "Before my eyes, beautiful Timure was reduced to ruins," he said. "Now there is nothing but a vast expanse of sand and mud." Gautam and others spent the night in the forest, surviving on noodle packets dropped by an army helicopter, before being flown to Bidur the next morning. "Only after boarding the helicopter did I feel that I had actually survived," he said.
