By Gopal Sharma
KATHMANDU, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Nepali labourer Bibek Kumal was digging a toilet pit outside a newly built house on Wednesday when a wall of water, mud and rock came roaring down, sweeping him and everything near him away.
Kumal, 24, was working in Bidur, downstream from the worst-hit Rasuwa district, near Nepal’s Himalayan border with China’s Tibet, when he heard a hissing sound. His four co-workers, standing above the five-foot (1.5 metre) deep pit, shouted at him to get out and run.
By the time he scrambled out of the pit, his co-workers had already fled.
“I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it was an earthquake,” Kumal said from his bed at Kathmandu’s National Trauma Centre, his brother Dinesh sitting beside him.
The torrent swept him downstream amid mud and debris, but “luckily I was stuck up in a mango tree”, he said. “Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death.”
The flash flooding has killed at least 95 people and hundreds, including many foreigners, are missing in one of Nepal’s worst disasters.
Three others also injured in the flood were being treated alongside Kumal, as more people were transported to the capital Kathmandu. Authorities said they had rescued more than 114 people so far and they were being treated at different hospitals in Kathmandu and Rasuwa.
Outside the hospital, well-wishers, friends and onlookers crowded the small compound of the trauma centre.
HOUSE DISAPPEARED
The flood, triggered after what appeared to be the collapse of a mass of mud and rock into a river on the frontier between Nepal and Tibet, devastated settlements and infrastructure downstream.
Security footage captured on the Chinese side of the border showed many people fleeing before a wall of rock, mud and water destroyed buildings and vehicles and took many lives.
The exact cause of the mudslide was not clear, but the German Research Centre for Geosciences said there was a 4.4-magnitude quake about seven minutes before the time shown on the security footage time-stamp.
Survivor Kumal said as he clung to the mango tree, he watched the house where he had been working disappear.
Police later reached him and pulled him to safety. He suffered injuries to his right leg after being struck first by the water and then by a large stone. His own home, located elsewhere, escaped damage, he said.
NEPAL HAS A HISTORY OF DISASTERS
Mostly mountainous Nepal experiences deadly floods and landslides every monsoon season, and is prone to other natural disasters. As a teenager, Kumal himself lived through the devastating 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people.
In the hospital bed opposite him, 11-year-old Rihana Lamichhane narrowly escaped.
“I was at school. They closed the school because of this and asked us to go home,” she said. “As I was crossing the river, suddenly flood water came gushing down.”
She suffered injuries to her chest and leg but said: “I am happy to be safe. I have no idea what happened to my friends.”
Her mother, Rita, said she rushed to find her daughter after receiving a call from a friend.
“I am happy nothing serious happened to my daughter,” she said. “I am relieved to find her safe.”
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; Writing by Aftab Ahmed; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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