KATHMANDU, Nepal: After searching six hospitals, Guan Daoxuan still did not know whether his wife, 37, was alive.
She had been working on a highway project near the Nepal-China border when the devastating flood of Aug 26 struck. A friend in the Nepalese government alerted Guan about the disaster, telling him to check whether she was safe.
When he could not get through to her, the 38-year-old knew “something was seriously wrong”.
He asked his in-laws to look after their nine-year-old grandson, saying only that he had an urgent matter to attend to, before travelling from Chengdu to Kathmandu in search of his wife.
The boy knew about his mother, Guan said, but did not “fully grasp the gravity of the situation”.
In Nepal, Guan joined other families waiting for news, scanning missing person notices for a familiar face or name. More than a week later, still nothing.
“I want to tell her that no matter how far away she is, I’m going to bring her home,” he vowed, overcome with emotion. “Dead or alive, she’s coming home with me.”
Close to 1,460 people have died and more than 5,000 — including Guan’s wife — remain missing after an ice and rock avalanche high on Langtang Lirung mountain became a debris flow that thundered down the valley below.
More than 7,500 homes along the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli river system have been damaged or destroyed, while only 112 bodies have been identified and handed over to their families.
With the initial rescue phase over, much of the response has shifted to recovery efforts, which remain difficult and dangerous as swollen rivers, damaged roads and the threat of further landslides hamper access to affected areas.
The CNA documentary, Nepal: The Flood’s Wake, followed rescuers and volunteers as they searched for missing persons, recovered bodies and carried aid to survivors, even as many of them grieved for their own relatives and friends.
WATCH: The search for victims after Nepal’s deadly flood (47:08)
RECOVERING HUMAN REMAINS
In Chitwan district, nearly 200km downstream from where the disaster began, civilian police and paramilitary Armed Police Force teams were searching the Narayani River for bodies.
Armed Police Force deputy superintendent Dharma Bahadur Thapa said more than 360 bodies had been recovered after the Bhotekoshi flood, with bodies and body parts still being carried into the Narayani.
The area’s relatively flat terrain, he said, had contributed to the numbers recovered there.
But the search was hazardous. Rain had strengthened the river currents, with mud and construction debris also moving through the water, and the waves were high enough to overturn their rafts, officers warned.
By the 11th day of operations, Nepal Police sub-inspector Sonu Kumar Mishra said the recovery work was weighing on the teams.
“It brings (us) great sorrow because our brothers have ended up in such a state,” he said. “It’s painful to retrieve the bodies, but we’re doing so to prevent the situation from becoming more complicated and severe.”
On the river islets, officers picked their way through marshy and quicksand-like ground, where they risked getting stuck. The search area included Chitwan National Park, where teams had to remain alert to tigers, rhinos and elephants.
Under these conditions, they relied on small clues to locate human remains, such as strong odours or birds gathering in one spot. And when a sharp whistle prompted officers to hurry over, it meant a body had just been discovered.
The remains were wrapped in plastic, placed on a stretcher and carried back to the raft. Thapa said the teams also doused dead bodies with phenol, a disinfectant, to reduce the smell and bacteria first.
Most bodies were so decomposed that forensic officers could not determine the gender. But they documented whatever identifying features remained. Tattoos, height and other physical markers may offer clues, but for many families, identification ultimately depends on DNA.
At a burial site in Chitwan, the district’s police office chief, Rameshwar Paudel, said 335 unidentified bodies had been placed there. Investigators extracted teeth for DNA sampling; when teeth were unavailable, they collected bone samples instead.
The samples were sent to the police forensic department for comparison with DNA from relatives of missing persons, in the hope of returning the dead to their families.
For inspector Rabin Khadka of the Armed Police Force, the job of retrieving so many bodies had put him off meat. “I just didn’t want to eat meat items (in the) last 10 days,” he said.
But the prospect of returning flood victims to their families kept him going.
“We feel lucky that we may (be able to) hand over dead bodies to their relatives,” he said in halting English. “That’s (what) encourages us to deploy here and to take risky jobs.”
“HUMANITY IS INSIDE HERE”
Nepalis are no stranger to natural disasters: Earthquakes, landslides and floods have repeatedly tested their communities. And now a new generation must learn to recover, rebuild and live with what this latest catastrophe has left behind.
In Nuwakot district, at an emergency shelter for displaced families, Gautam Man Singh, 53, made sure to check on the children — where are your slippers, he asked — and warn them not to wander outside.
He and his friends opened the shelter the day after the disaster, cleaning an empty centre they found and using whatever money they had. Fifteen people arrived on the first day, followed by another 73 over the next two days, he recalled.
Many of them came crying and in shock. Some children had lost parents and other family members. “One child yesterday (took) my hand and said, ‘I want my mum,’” said Singh, a social worker. “I had no answer.”
He, too, lost people he loved: 16 of his cousins and friends. “My mind is disturbed, definitely, but still, humanity is inside here,” he said, gesturing towards his heart. “So I have to (help).”
That instinct to help is something Samir Gurung, 27, also has. He was at college when his friend, the president of youth-led non-profit organisation Hami Nepal, called him about the flood.
He left immediately to manage tents and rations before joining teams carrying food, medicine, water purifiers and cooking utensils to isolated communities.
Gurung lost a cousin and his maternal uncle, a trekking guide who was returning from Tibet’s Mansarovar with Indian tourists, in the flood. Staying busy with relief work has helped him cope.
“This is the only thing that I can do right now to make sure that my mind doesn’t go everywhere,” he said. Being in the field “helps me suppress my emotions”, he added.
But getting aid to rural areas was difficult. The flood had destroyed the Trishuli Corridor, forcing the team to go off-road from village to village.
Rain increased the risk of landslides, while warnings of another flood and large mudslides had everyone on high alert.
It took his team six to seven hours to reach their final stop, Mahabhir village. They pushed on up the mountains even as daylight faded and nightfall brought the danger of a rockfall tumbling down without warning.
The relief work left Gurung with mixed feelings. Facing bereaved families was “really hard”, he said. With the scale of the devastation, there were “so many problems” the volunteers could not solve, which ate away at him.
But he was also glad to help where he could, despite the risks. “It gives me an opportunity to live my life completely,” he said, “to be helpful to others as well who have needs.”
PREPARING FOR WHAT COMES NEXT
For many survivors, what was needed was medical treatment.
At one hospital where the Armed Police Force had deployed additional doctors, consultant physician G R Khatri said they were seeing around 100 to 150 patients, including people with fractures and soft tissue injuries.
Others were being treated for fever and illnesses that could spread through contaminated water or through mosquitoes, such as diarrhoea, dengue and malaria. The hospital had also become a temporary refuge for flood victims whose homes had been destroyed.
“If (my grandsons) hadn’t dragged me (to safety), I’d have gone with the flood,” a woman told Khatri.
Elsewhere, residents and volunteers were finding ways to reconnect places cut off by the flood, which had destroyed more than 40 bridges in its path.
Along the Trishuli, volunteers brought traditional zip-line trolleys back into use to carry people and cargo across the river. Hami Nepal also deployed drones to transport relief supplies and recover human remains without exposing volunteers to dangerous crossings.
“We wanted to use new technology such as drones to assist in crisis management during disasters and to instil new hope,” said Hami Nepal president Bishal Shrestha, 27.
The flood also exposed weaknesses in Nepal’s early warning system. In several places, sensors monitoring rising water went offline before they could register the scale of the disaster.
One gauge in the lower valley recorded a level of just 1.62m before it stopped transmitting. “It got washed away before it could speak out,” said Saroj Dhoj Joshi, whose company develops flood monitoring systems.
He said Nepal needed a denser monitoring network, together with an algorithm and computer system that can analyse signals from seismometers, geophones and accelerometers to pinpoint where a flood has likely occurred.
“We don’t have that technology yet, but that can be developed,” he said.
The need has become more urgent, as extreme events that used to occur “once in five, six, 10 years” may happen up to four or five times in a year now, he added.
Kathmandu University glaciologist Mohan Bahadur Chand described the Himalaya as geologically young and fragile, still shifting by a few centimetres each year and vulnerable to earthquakes, landslides and rockfalls.
With global warming and climate change expected to continue, “the mountain hazards are going to increase”, said Binod Parajuli, a senior hydrologist in Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology.
And it is younger Nepalis in particular who are “facing all the consequences”, said Gurung. “As a green nation, we have very (little) carbon emissions, but our surroundings … get affected as well.”
Where the country has shown its strength is in its communities coming together in the flood’s wake and in its people showing up for others despite suffering loss.
As Singh put it: “This is my duty. These are my people, and … I have to do this.”
Watch the documentary, Nepal: The Flood’s Wake.
Source: CNA/dp