For two decades, the landscape around Nepal’s Lhende–Trishuli river corridor has steadily filled with roads, bridges, hotels, truck yards, substations and hydropower infrastructure, leaving a violent mountain river with less room to absorb sudden surges. A comparison of satellite imagery over the period helps explain why the latest floods were so devastating, according to a report by TOI’s Chandrima Banerjee .
The geography has always been brutal: a narrow Himalayan gorge, steep slopes and very little level ground. But what has changed dramatically is the scale of development packed into that constrained space.
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The consequences were laid bare on August 26, when a flood tore through the Lhende river corridor after apparently being triggered by the collapse of bedrock and part of a glacier high above the valley. The torrent travelled downstream along a roughly 168-km path for about 10 hours, killing at least 469 people across Nepal and Tibet and leaving nearly 1,500 missing, according to the report.
