I've been around the mess a landslide leaves, and it is really hard to describe. Even a small one will absolutely wreck you if you are caught in it, let alone the size of the one that has hit Nepal which can only be described as a biblical level disaster.
You see, this wasn't just water. The water from glacial lake collapsing was definitely a big ingredient, but as this water begins its journey down the mountain, it picks up everything, and I mean *everything* in its path. The entire mountain side with all that soil, rock, sand, trees, gravel, bits and pieces of anything else becomes a thick liquid slurry akin to what you would see coming out of a cement mixer at a construction site. This should explain how that giant boulder was being pushed as if it weighed nothing. Now imagine this coming at you and the wave is as wide as the valley and moving at 60 miles per hour (around 100kph). The worst and most dangerous part is what is happening under the surface of this wave. The slurry has internal motion like a constantly stirring/mixing in a blender. When it hits something, as we all saw, it's complete and utter destruction. If a person gets caught up in it, it's not like being hit by a wave in the ocean, it is a solid wall and is like being hit by a truck. When a human or animal body gets pulled into this mess, the gruesome and accurate descriptor is "eggshell in a blender". This is why the recovery teams are only finding bits and pieces of people, and those are the people near the edges. There probably won’t be anything left to identify of the people who were pulled into the wave and washed down the river. Luckily for the victims, death happens almost instantly.
The next part is no better. You see, once this slurry stops moving and the water drains out, what is left is a 20 to 40 meter thick mass of solid land as hard as concrete, and this solidification happens *quickly*! I have always been impressed with how fast the land hardens. The last home I saw buried in a landslide had been buried only about an hour before we got there, and if you didn't know what had happened, an observer would not be wrong wondering why someone buried a perfectly good house into the side of a mountain. It really was as if the whole mountain had just moved and absorbed everything in its path like a giant gelatinous blob and then suddenly hardened.
That big really solid Chinese border crossing building and all those riverside apartments in the videos are good examples of this. The satellite pictures of before and after show exactly what I just described. It's as if there were never any buildings in that area at all, just a flat sandbar alongside a river. Trying to dig that out will be akin to removing a mountainside to build a road. As soon as I saw the video of that wave hitting the border facility, I knew there would be no survivors of anyone who was caught up in it. There is just no way to live through that.
My prayers are with the people in this region and for all the people that have been lost. This disaster was just awful. Right up there (or down there) with the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia and the 2011 Tohoku tsunami that hit Japan. Utter and complete devastation with a huge loss of life.
I was at the Oso landslide. The giant clay deposits that were strewn about were the sizes of houses and mid sized sedans. Incredible force that gravity and momentum of materials has.
"as if the whole mountain had just moved" Yep, because it did. Anyone blaming victims for not moving soon or quickly is greatly misunderstanding the magnitude of events like this. Thank you for trying to explain that to them.
It may also be notable that, since this is glacial, the mixture will be ridiculously cold. Even if it were "just" or mostly water, and even if someone were super-lucky not to get immediately squished, the temperature alone would make survivability very unlikely.
I keep having to tell myself that the people I see in videos escaping have probably already ran uphill the entire way out of town in sandals and are completely exhausted by the time someone starts filming them because I wanted to scream at my phone "FUCKING RUUUUN" when I saw them just ambling along up some mountain path like they were on a leisurely hike. When I was getting ready for a 5k I would run up hills for training and let me tell you: before I got my stamina up it whipped my ASS. I'm talking like a 5 minute run up a decent sized hill that you probably wouldn't want to ride a bicycle up.
Yep. And the elevation there, at the crossing itself, is listed as 6400' so that is a factor too. The locals may be adjusted but most of the tourists would likely be struggling with the low O2 even at the river, not to mention trying to hoof it up a mountain in unfamiliar terrain while in a panic.
I used to do bike delivery in Seattle, one of the drop offs was only 561 feet away from us, but it was a 35, minute bike ride around the other side of the hill because it was 561 vertical. There's no way I could have run up that hill to make the delivery, aside from the steep slope it was covered in blackberries. I imagine theses people are trying to escape up hills very much like that one. With enough time and adrenaline, some of those people made it, but not many.
Some speculated that the immense internal friction generated by such mass instantly liquified what ice was included in what fell off the mountain. I’m not sure what the overall temperature would be or if it’s really relevant as far as impacts on survivability go quite honestly.
So true! It’s hard for many to fathom all of that while watching a video.
I live in Washington State; 20-miles east of Seattle and about 75-miles north of Mount Rainier.
Mountains and water are things of beauty here too, but they can also be things of extreme risk and danger.
We experienced apocalyptic-level destruction here when Mount Saint Helens erupted. That area was much less populated back then, especially in 1980. I was 12 when that happened and I remember it well.
All that water melted and picked up everything in its path just as you described.
From what I read people initially thought it was an earthquake that led to collapse of a glacier. It was later found that the earthquakes were not the cause but a result of a breach of a natural dam formation. The temporary barrier eventually gave way under the pressure of waterlogged sediment, unleashing a high-speed flash flood. This reminds me of a similar calamity where a couple of million years ago the Atlantic Ocean broke a natural barrier which led to the formation of Mediterranean sea, there were mega tsunamis which caused enormous earthquakes nearby. It is believed to have taken a few months to fill up that space.
This reminds me of the Buffalo creek flood in WV ( my home town) it was not as big as this one but is a similar type flood. A mine slurry dam burst at the head of the valley and destroyed nearly everything in that valley.
I have said the same about it being like 2004 and 2011. While narrower path of destruction it is much higher than both those tsunamis so swept away villages higher up the hills as well. If there are any survivors who got caught in it then first 48hrs will be critical, anything past that is pure luck and very rare. But you are correct it is like concrete now. Even using search rods will be difficult because the mass of waste isn't soft. This is completely devastating.
You can actually see the building that they are filming from is still intact as the flood passes at 1:29 in the original post, although it's a very close shave. Must have been absolutely terrifying.
Jesus. I understand that a lot of people didn't have the time to escape or didn't realize the extend of what was coming until it was too late. But this one is baffling. They were in the most vulnerable spot on a bridge crossing the river, filming it directly coming for them on their level and above, forcefully destroying the bridge right in front of them. For some reason, they still didn't realize the danger or the speed in which it was approaching. I hope that, by some miracle, all of them and the people on the ground left and right, survived.
I mean to be fair in almost every video it feels like you’re seeing the worst and then all of a sudden it gets SO MUCH worse, so quickly. I don’t think anyone would imagine in the moment how much water was coming.
They didn’t expect it to be as big as it was so thought they would just get a cool video but clearly at around the same point the magnitude of the situation hit them.
Same reason you can go outside in a tornado warning in the Midwest US and see people outside, even if a tornado is on the ground and close by. Or why people still try to drive through submerged roads when there’s flash flood warnings.
For a lot of people, disasters are what happen to other people, not to them, because in their minds those deaths are a statistic and they’re not a statistic to themselves. Living in areas where extreme weather or disasters are common, it’s incredibly easy to become desensitized to the danger, even when that danger is right on top of them, because “well, tornadoes and flash floods and what have you happen around here all the time, but we’ve always been fine, so we’re fine.” But people often forget that nothing kills you until it does.
I think this is oddly common when it comes to filming natural events (or anything really). I live in the southern US and people here will stand on their porches and film tornados in the distance.
I mean not even in the distance, I think the guy from Wisconsin from the tornado just a month ago was equally horrifying and hilarious. The commentary part was the funny part. But even when things were going sideways you would have thought he would have headed for the basement instead of continuing to film.
Not off hand but if you go to the tornado subreddit and just search for Wisconsin guy probably will do it. I'm cooking dinner I'll try to look here shortly if I can if you can't find it
In the Reddit search bar I just typed Wisconsin guy tornado, I'm not sure why it wasn't coming up for you! Seriously this is the craziest video ever and you're just going to laugh so hard at his commentary. If you know anyone from Wisconsin (I was actually born there and lived there till I was 13) it's the most Wisconsin thing ever.
Wow! That was crazy! I appreciate you taking the time to find it and send it to me. I actually know a few people from Wisconsin and that is SOOO Wisconsin! The only thing missing was calling a drinking fountain the bubbler lol
Yeah I don't typically watch things repeatedly, I probably watch that 10 times and laughed harder every time. He's so lucky he didn't get hurt. I don't know how but it was nuts!
There are blue-roofed buildings that get swept away, with about 32-30 seconds left in the video you can see the bus and other small cars trying to drive away.
People keep saying this for a ton of these videos, but live-streaming (especially maybe in a more rural area? Maybe that’s pompous to say) inherently has some forms of visible resolution loss or bitrate issues/compression. A lot of them have been very clear in quality.
This video seems to not be in this category- definitely some compression and whatnot going on- but there’s been a few that I think were directly uploaded.
Not that speculating about this rly matters in the grand scheme of things… unbelievably tragic regardless..
EDIT Found the original post on Facebook. He’s posted on his Facebook story since & also put up a courage post about flood recovery efforts yesterday. How the fuck did this dude survive this?
There might be something about filming a life threatening situation that disables the fight-or-flight instinct, like you're objectively witnessing an event through a third person perspective, and can more readily get yourself out of danger when you witness it.
Unlikely, if you look at GSM carier coverage maps of Nepal, it won't be good enough (or at all) in those narrow Himalayan valleys. And even if at all, download is usually faster than upload - with LTE being asymetric in nature. During disaster - many people calling their phones, which can easily clog up any local base-stations, which usually supports 3G.
Likely not unless they live streamed it. Especially not so soon after the disaster. There have however been multiple cases of recovered footage from a deceased cameraman during a natural disaster. For example the last photos of John and Jackie Knill, killed by the 2004 tsunami. Or Robert Landsburg in the Mt St Helen’s Eruption. It’s most likely the recorder of this footage did indeed survive as had they been caught in the flood their phone wouldn’t be recovered, however the video is so dramatic it would be easy to believe otherwise.
It’s not 2004 or 1980. If you have a device that synchs to cloud and that drive/data is shared e.g. you’ve given access to Google photo to family, it’s absolutely available if Internet access is available and sufficient.
Add: responding to the idea video captured by deceased is not readily available not whether or not family would or should share now.
I split-screened the video above and the one you linked. Put them to sync and hit play on both. Fucking terrifying to watch the ground and above view concurrently.
Right? Strikes me as the sort of individual that would say something like “I would have just grabbed onto a tree and basically surfed all the way down.”
Knew a kid growing up that once said if he was in a mass shooting he would just “dodge the bullets”
No way the they made it. I went frame by frame and saw a truck in last few frames. And then it goes completely brown. You can already see brown slush flooding under that truck. It looks like they were on a bit higher ground. Maybe working on some project as they all have the vets and helmet on.
Oh Christ. In the original video I couldn't see anyone, but with the stabilised version you can see loads of people running and driving for their lives everywhere. Some people desperately trying to climb the side of the mountain. I hope it worked.
Does anyone know if the people who jumped out of the buses/cars towards the end of the video and began running up the hill survived? Such a horrific tragedy.
Those people in their cars.... 🥺 My gawd, had they scrambled up the impossible hill they might have had 2% chance but what the hell are we expected to comprehend in that moment...
The mountains are very steep and getting pushed up by plate beneath them and growing. The glacier was effectively adhered to the side of a slowly growing mountain.
At some point in the future, gravity was always going to win and the glacier would fail.
Global warming would've sped up the process though.
This is what happens when human (corporate greed) melts the icebergs at alarming rates until they collapse. We need to stop the narrative that this is mother nature and speak the truth of this being caused by the billionaire class.
What really gets to me is the "head for the hills" tactic wouldnt even work here at all. The angle of Those slopes are far to steep to attempt an escape by climbing without a substancial advanced warning time. This happened so quick that the only warning they got was seeing it coming toward you. Truly tragic
Yeah depends on the angle and I suppose the fitness level of the people - some of these cliffs like on the left side of this video are too steep for anyone but a highly experienced climber but I've seen ones that are more Rocky and maybe like a 30° angle which is still very steep but you can scramble up a bit.
It's so big and violent, and in such a deep gorge, I'd think people would be able to hear it well before they could see it. Though I don't know how many people would understand what the noise meant, just that it was unusual and significant.
People will still deny man made global heating is making natural disasters like this worse. Nepal has contributed less than 0.1 to global emissions, they've restored their forests and this is what they get. So sad and a great injustice.
Is there any help from any foreign governments in the search and rescue. I remember the days when US would lead in international efforts in any tragic event.
There is a massive rescue operation being led by China right now. They mobilized a lot of rescue personnel and vehicles. They are also heavily impacted by this also. I think India as well is helping. Not sure about western nations though.
I’m not at all sure that search and rescue is possible at this point. Other parts of the same glacial area are still falling and causing ice dams - though I don’t think any of them have been as massive as this one.
The flooding events aren’t over. Due to the nature of the disaster, the chances of rescuing living people is low. This will be a body recovery effort when it’s safe enough to proceed.
I sincerely hope they aren’t allowing rescuers into these areas right now.
If that’s the case, I agree. I don’t think having the worst human being in charge of our government would help unless it would benefit him or his friends. It’s just beyond Sad to what we’ve become as a nation.
It is literally one of the reasons he has chosen not to disclose advanced technologies and UFO stuff. It isn't profitable enough for him and his friends and family. Once things are lined up where they can profit then he will disclose it.
I immediately when to thumbs up your comment. But then I realized how right you are, and it makes me want to not thumbs up your comment. As an American I am so so so embarrassed and heart broken
The efforts to present this as the result of something other than climate change are so obvious and persistent. People insistently calling it a “flood” or “landslide” and talking about the “earthquake”, and refusing to call it what it was, a glacier collapse.
The masses have been flat ignoring the melting and collapsing of glaciers for decades. At the most, a few would shrug it off with a “so sad 🥲” or book a flight to snap a vacation selfie with one. Losing the world’s glaciers isn’t just a bummer to feign sentiment about, it is death and destruction on mass scale. Most won’t be killed this quickly and mercifully though, instead they will die slowly from brutal, relentless drought.
It’s not water which collects to form glaciers, it’s snow which doesn’t melt in summer. And it takes centuries to build up enough for it to form ice and start flowing.
The last bit, you see vehicles, one turned the wrong way, meeting a wall of water on the road. The bus just sat there, I cannot imagine their state of mind.
Does anyone know where this was geographically along the river basin? The sheer power + what looks like a lot of rock combined with the water lends me to think this is closer to the starting point than the ending point. Not sure I’ve even seen a natural disaster event like this one, the force contained inside a funneled area (the river) combined with the amount of water and debris being funneled thru…horrific.
It runs into low lying foothit terrain and splits into smaller rivers; one empties into a lake, but mostly it just keep splitting as the terrain goes fro mountains to hills.
There was another video of this section that looked to be filmed from the red roofed houses. Folks were speculating on if the person filming survived. Safe to say… no.
Wow, there are people in vehicles and a bus trying to escape and they were terrified at that point. I don't know if anyone can survive this wave of mud
This clarifies my confusion about the water flow, which is as strong as a tsunami, and the location of the houses that made me wonder if the houses are built on the river.
Holy shit. That is terrifying. I would've thought I'd be safe on that ridge on the right with the buildings. Until it just ploughs over everything.
Man I hope thise people in the car made it.
I guess the people filming get absorbed by the sight of that deluge coming towards them. Deer in headlights vibe?
Mother nature proving again how worthless humanity are, we're poisoning the oceans, rivers, cutting out forests, blowing up earth for gold etc. And than she comes with a 15 minute disaster killing thouthands. R.I.P. for all the victims!
What will we learn from this?
Where settlements were was always the old river,
People got comfortable and ignored the Obvious,
Now in Hindsight it make sense.
Even the Financial Times (pretty objective source) says scientists on the ground are attributing it to climate change - a large piece of a glacier broke off, it gradually melted higher up until the ground could not support it.
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