A journey to the frontline of Nepal’s disastrous floods

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, a treacherous journey to the villages on the front line of Nepal's floods.

0:23So, this all began around 8.30 in the morning on Wednesday the 26th of August, when fragments from a melting glacier high up in the Himalayas in Nepal crashed down into a valley and sent this surge of water down a river valley coursing through Tibet and then Nepal so quickly that most villages had no warning. They had minutes, some even seconds, to get out of its way. Hannah Ellis-Peterson, The Guardian's South Asia correspondent, reached Nepal the day after the disaster. When we arrived, access was really difficult. There was only really a road left to one of the last towns that was hit by these floods, this town called Bidor.

1:06Most village homes had been washed away. Hundreds of people were missing from there. I mean, it was apocalyptic scenes. But up in Bidor, we also met a lot of people who'd been evacuated from the higher-up villages. And all of them said their villages had gone. They'd been washed away. so we knew that we needed to get up there that up close to the border with Tibet was where the kind of true toll of this would become really evident They would spend the next few days trying to start their journey waiting out bad weather finding a four-wheel drive making several false starts Then on Tuesday morning they finally got the green light

1:52Hannah went with Guardian photographer Amir Khan and their fixer and translator Gwarav Pokhorel. And that was when we finally set out at 5am to go down roads we knew would be treacherous. We knew this would be a difficult road, but this is the only way to access it. We thought it would be a six-hour drive, but it turned out to be a lot longer and a lot harder than we had actually anticipated. Over the following days, Hannah and her team inched their way towards the Nepalese border with Tibet. The further they travelled, the more they began to understand the scale of the devastation. And what had been lost.

2:33This is a country in the forefront of the climate crisis. Every year it's hit by floods, glaciers melting. So I've reported on a lot of these stories a lot of catastrophe, but nothing like this. The scale of it, that terrifying black wave of water that came down, They never thought the river could do this. They never thought it would take their lives the way it has. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, stories from the epicentre of Nepal's devastating floods.

3:12Hannah Ellis-Peterson, you're The Guardian's South Asia correspondent. and you're currently in Nepal covering the terrible floods that have caused such destruction and death there. We know that over a thousand people have died, thousands more are missing. Last week when we spoke to you on the latest, you were unable to reach the parts of Nepal that were most affected. But this week you were able to journey to a place called Rasuwa. So where is Rasuwa and why did you decide to try and get there? So we were in Kathmandu, but the worst affected areas were up close to the border of Tibet in Rasua.

3:52Kathmandu is kind of in the center of Nepal, and the flood affected areas were basically directly up north, following first the Chishuli River and then the Boti Khoshri River, which go right up to the border with Chinese-controlled Tibet. This area had been extremely difficult to access up to this point, but we were desperate to get there. There's a place named Hari. OK. And then we'll go off-road. OK, off-road. OK. But the road, the highway that was up there had been washed away. And so the only way to reach there was these village roads that basically wound around very, very high mountain valleys.

4:26This is an area of Nepal that's completely underdeveloped. There are no bridges to cross these valleys. There are no paved roads. This is a muddy, pebbled track, basically, which is not supposed to carry heavy traffic. We basically had to do this extremely treacherous route up, up, down, up, down, over kind of 12 hours on a mud track. Being, you know, with an absolute precipice around one side, you're going so high up, you know, we're driving over 2 ,000 metres high, then going back down, then going back up again. It's been tipping it down with rain. So we went through thick fog, rain. We encountered multiple trucks that had flipped over.

5:09We had to wait. There was landslides along the road. We had to wait. The roads had turned to a big muddy puddle. We had to wait. So we've been driving now for about seven hours. I think everyone in the car has agreed this has been by far the most treacherous drive we've ever taken. It's been muddy and full of rubble and we've hit landslides at various points. and you know as awful as this drive was the journey itself is a very important part of the story that we're trying to tell the lack of access is fundamental to why it will be so so difficult to find so many of these people the kind of difficulties that the nepali authorities are facing you know 4 000 plus people are missing up there and the only way currently they can get access to them is in helicopter you know in terms of bringing stuff up this road in terms of bringing resources.

6:06It wasn't just us driving up there. Every aid truck, everyone who wants to get to that area now has to take this road. The journey sort of really enhanced my understanding of the scale of this disaster.

6:22The thing to say is this was also an extraordinarily beautiful drive. You know, the mountains of Nepal, rural Nepal, it was so, so beautiful. You were going through these villages, these rural villages, which were, you know, bright green with these rice paddies. It's kind of quite sort of bucolic, rural Nepali life. People are so kind, you know, you stop, they want to give you tea, they want to talk to you. But it was also kind of heartbreaking because these very same villages are the ones that have washed away. You know, we got a glimpse of the life that has been taken. But, you know, doing this drive and then coming and seeing what was along the river was very, very tough.

6:59And I think all of us kind of stood there on a hill at one point and looked down and we just couldn't really say anything to each other because we were just so shocked by what we were seeing below us.

7:16You stopped at a village called Betrawati. Can you just tell me, where was this on your journey and what kind of scenes were you confronted with when you arrived there? So Betrawati was the first point where we really got to see the impact of the flood. You know, you could see, you know, we got to the Trushuli River, which is the river which was kind of the pathway of these floods, and you could see the kind of scar of the landscape from the water and the debris. And Betrawati village was just submerged. You look down, there was almost nothing left. We can see river nearby our side at this point, yes.

7:54But this was earlier, this was on the right side. Okay. Where we can see that one house where there's one clock also. Yeah. The river was nearby that house, but the river has changed the way now. Yeah, it's changed direction completely. Yeah, it's changed the direction completely, yes. And we can see one school bus also. This was flown away at the time of flood that day. Yeah. This is great here. but nothing left now, only sand. Only sand and mud. Yeah. It was just this barren, muddy landscape. And then when we finally went, drove down to the banks of this village, you could kind of see the remnants of life that were buried in the mud here.

8:39Teddy bears, glasses, record books, you know, little pieces of people's lives were just buried. But then also most homes weren't even standing. It was a six-storey house that you could only see the top two stories. That's how deep the mud had got. And there were a few people who had come back to some of these homes and some people who'd come back and there was nothing there to see. Just horrifying. And I think you spoke to a woman who had not only lost her home and all of her possessions, but also several members of her family are still missing. Could you tell us what happened to her and what she told you?

9:20So, yeah, it was quite an extraordinary sight. We walked into this kind of barren landscape of mud and then there is a woman kind of shaking out clothes and blankets thick with mud and she was just lying them out in the sun. She'd been pulling whatever she could from her brother's house, which had stood next to her house. They're throwing possessions down from the top floor. The only one not covered in, not completely submerged in mud. And her house was there, but it was just filled with mud, and it was impossible for her to get into.

10:03She'd only just built this house. She built it 10 months ago. She'd never even had an opportunity to move in. She'd built it for her and her grandchildren to live in. And five members of her family were missing.

10:20Her brother, her brother's wife, their children. She didn't even know how many people in the village had gone missing, but she said it was hundreds. And she was just there trying to find any little fragment of their life. You know, she was saying, this is no longer my home, I can't live here anymore.

10:43It was like heaven, but now it's like hell. And, you know, she's right. This was the scenes of hell there in Vechalwati. I mean, the scale of that kind of loss and devastation in terms of, you know, a whole community, their homes, people just being wiped away, that the shock must just be enormous. I mean, yes. And I think the more horrible part about it is rescue workers haven't really been able to get to Betrawati. So actually beneath this mud are the people of Betrawati, the bodies that have not been able to be pulled out yet. And that was very evident across the river. We could see rescue workers on the other side pulling what we later realised were bodies from a building.

11:30What are they doing? What is this here for? What is it for? This helicopter? It's saying that some dead body has been found there and they came to... So they're retrieving a dead body? Yes. Are those? Yes.

11:50They managed to recover 24 bodies from the building that was across the river in Betrawati. And they were just tying them up in white body bags. And these body bags were just being tied to helicopters and being flown off. And, you know, there are hundreds more missing in Betrawati. and they haven't actually really been able to start looking for them. So all of the residents said, you know, who knows how many people died here? We can't even understand the scale of it. We don't even know who is missing.

12:31I think you also spoke to a man there who was still searching for his wife. Is that right? So, yeah, I think this was actually the toughest interview we did the whole trip.

12:45This man, Dil Bahadur Shrestha, we came upon him. He was just walking through the remains of his home, and we asked him what he was doing, and he said he was looking for his wife, Jamina. So he didn't... Yeah. She's beneath this. So he thinks that she's still here? Yeah, yeah. So he's searching for her. He said, she is buried here, I think, and I'm just trying to find her body. They worked together 50 years. He was 70, she was also 70. This was a house that they'd built together. You know, their children lived next door. And he had been in his rice paddy fields a few hundred metres away at the time.

13:27He'd been giving grass to his cow when he felt the ground tremble beneath him. And he looked up and he saw the water coming down. and he ran uphill into the forest. He saw Betrawati destroyed in a matter of two minutes as he ran uphill. And he looked over to try and see his house where he knew his wife was and he couldn't see it. And when he eventually spoke to people in the village, they said they'd seen her trying to usher her chickens, which she loved apparently, into the house to keep them safe. And he thinks she thought that actually she would just be safe in the house. and there was nothing left of that house.

14:07It was just, you know, mud, debris. And so he'd just come to look for her, and he said he couldn't really get his head around the fact that she'd gone.

14:20He still thinks that his wife is moving there, grazing the goats and all the animals. So he can't imagine that she's gone? Yeah. He cannot still believe. so he's sorting her whether she's still moving her and he just sat on the ground and said I just I can't believe she's gone and so he felt like he really needed to find her body to sort of I think come to some kind of peace with the fact that she probably has gone he just said I'm completely alone now he says he cannot sleep at night he cannot eat at day everything is alone he can't get home

15:06It was just really shocking to speak to him. And, you know, you're staring out at the ruins of this house where his wife and his whole life was and it's gone. And it was really hard. All of us found that a really, really, really hard interview. And, yeah, it sort of just showed how, you know, she is just one of these thousands of missing and how difficult it is going to be for Nepal rescue teams. is really treacherous. This mud is so deep. You see rescue workers stepping and just getting honestly mud up to their necks, having to be absolutely wrenched out. And, you know, a lot of these places, helicopters can't land because there is still this thick mud.

15:43And so they haven't been able to get people onto the ground because they don't know what is a, you know, the roads are gone and they don't know what's a safe terrain to land a helicopter. So, you know, we spoke to the police who'd only just got to this village called Timur up on the border on Tuesday. And on that day, they'd found 90 bodies. And they said, there will almost certainly be more. And those scenes, the kind of scenes that you saw in Betrawati, halfway through your journey, did that kind of reflect what else you saw as you continued up towards the worst affected areas? Yeah, I mean, from that point onwards, that was what it was.

16:21The whole riverbank was completely taken out. And the stories we heard were much the same. Just everything gone, village after village. decimated. We tried to go to a village called Safavasi, which we'd heard had been really badly hit. And we went down this little track and we got to what should have been the road to Safavasi and it was gone. And we realized we couldn't actually get there. And when we kind of went further along, everyone told us, you know, there is no Safavasi. That village doesn't exist anymore. You know, it is just a bank of mud. It could be completely buried. Completely buried.

16:58completely buried. 500 people at least are missing. It's a village of 2 ,000. That's a quarter of the population, you know. And everyone, we spoke to a few people who were there. You know, we interviewed government officials about, you know, what was going on. And they'd had relatives in Safravesi. You know, we spoke to one official who was giving us information. And he said, well, actually, you know, my wife and my children were there and I haven't heard from them. Every person we spoke to knew somebody who was missing. I don't think we met one person up there who didn't know somebody. And then the problem is it's all missing, you know, and it's really, really difficult to know when people will get some actual answers.

17:34You know, whether they will ever find the bodies, because the problem is, you know, the river hit fast and it brought loads of the bodies further downstream. So actually in Chitwan, which is a southern part of Nepal, hundreds of bodies are washing up right now. And that's actually where most of the bodies are being found, 100 miles away from where the disaster struck. Because, I mean, some bodies have been found in India. the long distance that some of it travelled. So that's sort of, again, the scale, how difficult it would be to identify the bodies, to find people who were in different places.

18:05And I think that's the biggest challenge now, is trying to identify those people who were turning up.

18:25and I mean you're talking about how on earth you respond to a crisis like this I think you visited a relief camp while you were there too that you know which is full of people who've essentially become refugees can you tell us about your experiences there so yes there was As we were driving, we just kind of saw this relief camp, which had been set up by a local Nepali hospital that does a lot of community outreach. And we went in and there were a lot of children there. They said almost half the children here have lost a parent or two. You know, none of these kids have schools anymore. All the schools that they were in were washed away.

19:03And it was here that we met a teacher for one of these schools. He just told us this horrible story of, you know, the morning of the floods. This was just a little bit up from Betrawati, just to give you a sense of the geography. They'd been given about a 10-minute warning, but the school bus was already out picking up kids for the morning. Thankfully, they managed to get hold of the bus driver and gave him a warning. He drove the bus uphill and they managed to save the kids in the school bus. But a lot of the children walked to school. So there was a whole settlement who'd been affected in the 2015 earthquake.

19:38they lived in an informal settlement along the river and their children walked to school and all of those children are missing 200 children between the ages of about 5 and 11 200 in one community? Yeah and the teacher he just said we saved the school bus we just couldn't save those who were on the road

20:04And as you said these are communities where these kind of natural disasters are, in a way, a way of life, right? Particularly over the last couple of decades. But it seems like, from what people are telling you, this was something completely different, like the scale of this. Yes. I mean, you know, Nepal has floods every single year. People are displaced. You know, this area had flooding last year. You know, it killed about a dozen people. So it is something that, you know, people are aware of, they know. But everyone we spoke to, you know, old, young, you know, lots of people who've lived through many natural disasters, many crises, this is something that is their lived reality.

20:48They could not believe what had happened. They could not believe the floods. Every single person said we just didn't know that this was possible. We didn't know floods on this scale could happen, that this level of disaster could just wipe out so many lives. I mean, they live in these villages, you know, it's very simple homes made of like stone and mud and brick. And the community just said we just didn't know how fond of what we were before this happened.

21:18Coming up, the moment of relief in amongst all this tragedy that Hannah found on her return journey.

21:37Have you found yourself confessing personal things to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude? You're not alone. Something huge is underway that we haven't really found the words for yet. A new voice in our ear, guiding what we think and feel and do. But should we trust it? I just thought, what has this thing done to him? Black Box, The Chatbots, a new podcast series from The Guardian Investigates. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. How many days did you stay up there before you decided that you needed to start the journey back down to Kathmandu? So we were there for two days. We arrive in Dunche, which is the town which is where there is an army base and they've been doing a lot of the evacuations there.