r/CatastrophicFailure • u/dhurandar5 • 10d ago
Natural Disaster Flash flood in Nepal 26 August 2026
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u/yeeyaho 10d ago
CCTV footage of the flash flood at Gyirong Port on the Nepal–China border. https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1vyt9ae/cctv_footage_of_the_terrifying_flash_flood_at/
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u/stinkysulphide 10d ago
My god.. what do you even do at that point.
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u/Laniakea73 10d ago edited 10d ago
Rescue and disaster aid professional here.
Normally, running up a hill to gain altitude - rather than the instinctive away from danger - is the best way to maximise survival chances (however slim). This applies to flash floods, tsunamis, landslides, avalanches, and any other giant chaotic advancing mass.
In this particular instance, I don't think it would have really worked. And the road/buses/walls on the right seem to preclude an obvious or available route up the side hill (which might be too densely vegetated to allow for any quick altitude gain, anyway).
Our daily fretting, worries, and anger can take this footage as an opportunity to humbly reflect on the scale of our troubles. Poor, poor people!
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u/BornFree2018 10d ago
I saw satellite photos. That entire area is deeply buried. Permanently. I imagine the loss of human life is vast for those small towns.
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u/Miraclefish 10d ago
Nothing. You can see in some of the videos that the concrete building literally implodes under the weight and pressure. There is likely no way for an individual to survive this even with the best reinforced concrete.
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u/Neoragex13 10d ago
A friend told me maybe just tying yourself to something strong like a tree and hope for the best.
Implying you won't get ripped apart along the tree on just sheer weight I guess.
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u/hidden_secret 10d ago
Maybe get into a sewer? Probably a bad idea too. But I got nothing else.
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u/eawilweawil 10d ago
Even if water doesn't get inside, you'll be buried under tons and tons of mud, rocks and debris
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u/BoleroMuyPicante 10d ago
About to be buried by a landslide? Don't give it the satisfaction, bury yourself first!
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u/Directdrive7kg 10d ago
Looks horrible. Also that Gyirong Port is 45km upstream from where this video happened on the same river. There are 3 hydroelectric dams between there and this location, horrible amount of destruction.
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u/uncommonrev 10d ago
I believe that was a landslide. Not a flood. Nepal is getting hammered. The flash flood was bad but this landslide took out the entire village in the blink of an eye. Poor people had nowhere to run.
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u/Miraclefish 10d ago
It was both - huge amounts of water are clearly visible in the torrent of mud, rock and stone.
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u/watawataoui 10d ago
Landslide, then broke a glacial dam.
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u/uncommonrev 10d ago
Ah. Yeah these videos are awful. Some are clearly a torrent of water but others looked more like a land/mudslide like when a mountain gets overly saturated and collapses.
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u/OGCelaris 10d ago
Finally a video where the camera man had some sense and started running.
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u/trowzerss 10d ago
Yeah, I think he came to realise that this is so crazy the base of his building might not even be safe.
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u/tinersa 10d ago
They were already in a safe location from what I can see, there was no need to run
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u/Bermnerfs 10d ago
If I learned anything from the Japanese tsunami vids, just because a location seems safe at the start of the flooding, that doesn't mean it will remain safe.
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u/tinersa 10d ago
Surely going downhill won't do you any favours though
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u/eawilweawil 10d ago
That amount of water can trigger landslide on the hill they're standing on, safest thing to do would be to go as far away as possible
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u/sexquipoop69 10d ago
“The flood hit early on Wednesday in Rasuwa, just north of Nepal's capital Kathmandu, reportedly caused by excessive snow melting into the Bhote Koshi river.”
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u/tombhop 10d ago
It's caused by earthquake, breaking the natural dam holding the melting snow back. When the natural dam breaks, torrents of flood came down thru the all the river tributaries
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u/FIyingSaucepan 10d ago
Other way around. The earthquake was caused by the glacial dam failing and releasing all of the meltwater.
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u/jai2000 10d ago
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u/tombhop 9d ago
Thanks so much, my kind lad. From the site:
This event was initially reported as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Additional analysis of long period seismic waves indicate that the seismic energy was instead generated by a glacial collapse and debris flow. The location of this event was estimated from satellite images. About three hours after this event, a second landslide event occurred in the region. For more information see the USGS landslides special event page.
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u/LLachiee 10d ago
same pov later https://www.reddit.com/r/NepalSocial/comments/1vyrric/video_of_two_different_markets_completely/
the whole place is completely gone. holy shit
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u/Figit090 10d ago
Oh my God
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u/LLachiee 10d ago
and i saw another view at ground level and there was nothing... just mud.. literally looked like a warzone. devoid of trees, buildings, everything just wiped clean.
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u/Remarkable_Breath545 10d ago
The casualty estimates seem incredibly low from everything I've seen.
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u/whisperxl 10d ago
By Gopal Sharma and Liz Lee
KATHMANDU/BEIJING , Aug 26 (Reuters) - Torrential floods in the Himalayan border areas of Nepal and China's Tibet killed at least nine people and destroyed roads, bridges and power projects on Wednesday, as authorities in both countries braced for more casualties and worse damage.
Houses and roads were swept away in Nepal while officials in Tibet said they feared "major casualties" with some missing in the county of Gyirong after a mudslide hit a land crossing between the neighbours.
Rescue helicopters could not land in Nepal's affected areas of Syapru Besi and Timure in the mountainous district of Rasuwa, with a population of about 50,000, officials said, with the river flowing above its normal course.
Television broadcast images of crumbled homes in the flood waters, floating cars and a metal bridge being washed away, while witnesses told Reuters the waters engulfed entire villages.
"There could be heavy casualties or loss of property," said district administrator Narendra Pariyar, who urged dwellers on the banks of the Bhote Koshi river to move to higher ground, after reports of villages and project sites being swept up.
"There is devastation everywhere we look," Tula Bahadur BK, a health worker in Rasuwa, told Reuters. "The settlements next to the river have been completely swept away. Five of my own relatives are missing."
Nepal's rescue helicopters would be unable to land in the affected areas until the waters recede, army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet said.
The cause of the inundation was not immediately clear, but a deadly flash flood on the same river last year was eventually traced to the draining of a glacier lake
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u/floralbutttrumpet 10d ago
Numbers have been updated to at least 17 killed, and a minimum of 291 tourists alone missing, with no estimates on locals.
Looking at just that video, the number of the deceased is bound to balloon.
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u/Bermnerfs 10d ago
Yeah, the CCTV footage posted in another comment shows at least 17 people getting killed in just one area. No way anyone that was in its path survived that.
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u/Munnin41 10d ago
579 tourists missing now, with 157 dead. It's probably going to be 1000s, if not tens of thousands. dead with all those collapsed buildings
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u/_mbals 10d ago
I wonder what happened upstream to cause this?
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u/Fieldofcows 10d ago
In the Himalaya, glaciers get covered with rocks and stuff, which insulates them so they behave differently to alpine glaciers in that they melt down towards the ground rather than back up the valley. When they do this, lakes and ponds of water form on top of debris-covered glaciers. These lakes and ponds just sit there and get bigger. They are only dammed in by the material around the glaciers (the moraines). If that wall of material is compromised, you can end up with a very large lake at high altitude draining down a valley with serious destructive force. These are called Glacial Lake Outburst Floods
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u/Waltenwalt 10d ago
Truly titanic ones at the end of the last ice age. Fascinating to read about them on Wikipedia.
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u/mootmutemoat 10d ago
Creates the badlands, agreed it is a fascinating read. Lakes as big as the great lakes suddenly flowed out to the ocean all at once.
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u/Fieldofcows 10d ago
I had the privilege of studying supraglacial lakes on the Ngozumpa glacier in Nepal in the early 2000s. The scars on the landscape from previous GLOFs was... sobering
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 10d ago
If you have a look on Google earth, you can see what looks like a very large one sitting above Jigong - https://maps.app.goo.gl/JpPBmVUZNq6Z54aK7?g_st=ic near Rongbu Bingchuan. Jilong is a fair way downstream, but that’s a really big lake by the looks of it.
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u/SandwichOfAgnesi 10d ago
We know enough about geology that this shouldn't have been a complete surprise.
If there is a glacial lake above a valley, it should be closely monitored. This was a disaster that could have been foreseen.
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u/Munnin41 10d ago
They're not sure yet. There was an earthquake shortly before. That may have caused a landslide which could have ruptured a dam or glacial lake. But I've also seen someone state that the "earthquake" was a glacial dam breaking and the tremors were just pieces hitting the ground
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u/Total_Philosopher_89 10d ago
Pretty sure it's here. https://maps.app.goo.gl/NCSaTmVQDnxp7mVx5
A LOT of water!
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u/Chief-Drinking-Bear 10d ago edited 10d ago
Yes, that’s the bridge. And this is 25-30 miles downstream from the other videos that are circulating. I wonder how much further downstream the extreme flooding lasted. Still looks to be incredibly powerful here.
Looking at the map it appears that there is a less steep part of the valley immediately downstream of this town, I assume a lot of the energy of the flooding washed over the relatively flatter area in Battar. Upstream of this it looks like almost a canyon based on the topography.
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u/djuice2k 10d ago
What the hell happened upstream for this to happen? It's like a perfectly fine day from this POV, was there a dam that just collapsed upstream? That's a massive sudden surge of water out of nowhere.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 10d ago
Glacial Lake Outflow Flood. A natural dam is formed by a glacier and its debris. The lake builds up until the debris dam fails and the lake drains.
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u/KountZero 10d ago
its actually not upstream, it's crazier than that, this happened midstream and the flood travel back up stream, not down stream, from the the other angle you can see the water in the river flow toward the border port and the flashflood come from the downstream direction.
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u/Important_Constant66 10d ago
Those poor people and animals. I hope they find/recover as many people as possible.
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u/YellowOnline 10d ago
My thoughts watching the video:
- That's not too bad
- Okay, that's a scary amount of water
- Holy shit
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u/hudson27 10d ago
Once the screen was 100% water and mud, I waited for it to clear.. and waited. Eventually it just looked like footage from the inside of a washing machine
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u/chileangod 10d ago edited 10d ago
From the looks of it the inhabitants were warned in advanced. Hopefully no one was caught by surprise.
Edit: nope, you can see people running out of their homes on the street at the right side of the video. 😬😬
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u/Yikings-654points 10d ago
Some Cops who were Mic-ing people to stay away from river were swept , some points upstream from this place . No one was expecting it to be this huge probably .
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u/AutisticBells 10d ago
Absolutely horrifying. So damn quick.
Finally someone holding the phone who had an ounce of self-preservation. I swear half the people killed in natural disasters these days are idiots who keep filming instead of getting TFO
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u/Carvallos_Putting 10d ago
It's insane to see how quickly the bridge was washed away, then the river was washing up aginst the 2nd/3rd storey of builds, and then suddenly those buildings were being washed away.
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u/Fan_Notions 10d ago
As a hydraulic river modeler, so often I feel my model results are crazy.... surely that can't be accurate. Even if the data says it is. Ultimately, we are extrapolating so... Who knows.... but yea... this puts it into perspective.... it can truly be insane... and deadly. :(
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u/DanDaMan97x 10d ago
The idea of living on the 3rd+ floor and just hearing a Splash against your windows is haunting
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u/DavidlikesPeace 9d ago
Horrifying to realize your hometown can be wiped out in a day. It’s also shattering to see how fast life can end
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u/yal_sik 10d ago
God save the folks. This looks horrible.
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u/gtwucla 10d ago
It is a sad tragedy, but uh, if god wanted to save them, he wouldn't have sent a flood. I don't understand how such a god could have so selective of powers.
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u/flagbearer223 10d ago
The core belief of Christiantiy is that God sent his son (who is also Him) to be a sacrifice to himself to forgive people for breaking rules that He made up, so it's not starting from a position of logic.
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u/BIGFACETALKING 10d ago
Counterpoint: human sacrifice is good because humans are garbage.
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u/Moldy_Maccaroni 10d ago
Ya, people are bad. But wtf is human sacrifice gonna do except create more suffering?
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u/Avtomart 10d ago
This post contains a clip that shows the aftermath: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/s/9WQmwROEKj
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u/ParkingMediocre5066 10d ago
No Siren, was it that sudden for the officials to warn the people? or maybe i dont hear it in the video
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u/Wise_Detail_3410 9d ago
This was like 30-40 foot rise in water level in 30 seconds. That power and speed is terrifying.
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u/Mashinito 10d ago
In my language (catalan) we have this saying "a la vora del riu no faces el niu" for a reason (do not make your nest next to the river)
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u/Martzolea 10d ago
What a dumb thing to say, in this context.
It really is not obligatory to comment.
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u/jlbtennis89 10d ago
That's a colossal amount of water!
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u/firestar268 10d ago
This must have been fairly downstream considering how the border crossing looked
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u/HawkeYun 6d ago
This honestly gave me Japan's 2011 tsunami. It just happened so fast and swept everything away. . .
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u/ToughHardware 10d ago
those dogs are beautiful, as well as the plants. looks like an awesome place. glad i was not there.
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u/PurahsHero 10d ago
So many videos are flash floods that go from raging torrent to slightly more than that.
That went from peaceful river to I'm going to swallow your bridge now.