Thousands remain missing and aid is hampered by treacherous conditions in communities almost wiped out of existence
Searching for the body of his wife in the mud, Dil Bahadur Shrestha lamented that he did not even have a shovel left. For now, he has been using his hands to try to find her as he picks through the ruins of his house.
On Wednesday morning last week, Jamuna Shrestha, his wife of 50 years, had been at home in Betrawati on the banks of Nepal’s Trishuli River, feeding her beloved chickens and goats.
As deadly flash floods coursed down the river valley, Jamuna was last seen going back into her house, trying to usher her chickens to safety, while others fled uphill. Now that house stands like a muddy carcass, everything inside it destroyed or washed away by the violent force of the water and debris that killed more than 1,200 people in Nepal and Tibet.
Dil Bahadur Shrestha, 70, had been tending to his rice fields and feeding his cows on the opposite bank when he felt the ground tremble and saw a black wave, hundreds of metres high, coming down the valley. He ran to safety in the forest, but not before watching two bridges get swept away behind him. “When it hit, everything was destroyed within two minutes,” he said.
Dil Bahadur Shrestha, who is searching for his wife of 50 years, Jamuna.
He knows in his heart that his wife is gone, but like thousands caught up in the disaster, her body has yet to be found and she is counted among the missing. More than 5,000 people are reported missing in Nepal and a further 546 in the Tibet region of China.
Rescue workers have still not reached Dil Bahadur Shrestha’s home, so he returned to try to retrieve her body himself. “Maybe she thought the flood wouldn’t reach inside the house,” he said, wiping away tears.
The couple had already rebuilt their home once after an earthquake in 2015 that killed about 9,000 people. As he spoke, his frail body collapsed to the barren, muddy ground where his neighbour’s house once stood.
“Even now, I cannot believe that she is gone,” he said. “I cannot forget her. That’s why I keep walking around looking for her. I still feel as if she might be walking around somewhere here. I keep getting this feeling that she might still be here, looking after the chickens and the goats.”
A Rasuwa district sign in the flood debris in Betrawati.
The scale of the tragedy in Betrawati is unfathomable. It was 8.37am when a melting glacier high up in the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet crashed into the valley below, setting off deadly flash floods down Nepal’s Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. By 8.50am, with only a few minutes’ warning, the settlement of Betrawati was engulfed.
This once-thriving market town was submerged in mud so thick that only the top two floors of a six-storey building are visible. Most houses were washed away entirely or flipped on their sides by the sheer force of the floods. School buses lie overturned. A grocery shop was swept 200 metres from its original location and lies in ruins. The river itself has diverted to a new path that cuts through where the highway once was.
An overturned school bus hit by the flood water.
Fragments of the lives of the thousands who lived here lie scattered in the debris: kettles, teddy bears, a record-keeping book, saucepans, medicine packets, a pair of glasses. At least 250 people are missing, Dil Bahadur Shrestha’s brother and sister-in-law among them.
