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.
By the time he scrambled out of the pit, his co-workers had already fled. “I started running. “Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death. Three others also injured in the flood were being treated alongside Kumal, as more people were transported to the capital Kathmandu. 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. NEPAL HAS A HISTORY OF DISASTERS Mostly mountainous Nepal experiences deadly floods and landslides every monsoon season, and is prone to other natural disasters.
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. The flash flooding has killed at least 157 people and hundreds, including many foreigners, are missing in one of Nepal’s worst disasters. Authorities said they had rescued more than 114 people so far and they were being treated at different hospitals in Kathmandu and Rasuwa. As a teenager, Kumal himself lived through the devastating 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people.
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. His own home, located elsewhere, escaped damage, he said.
How A Nepali Labourer Survived The Flood Because Of A Mango Tree
“I was at school. “As I was crossing the river, suddenly flood water came gushing down. I have no idea what happened to my friends.
Because of this and asked us to go home,” she said, they closed the school.
She suffered injuries to her chest and leg but said: “I am happy to be safe. 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.” (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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. In the hospital bed opposite him, 11-year-old Rihana Lamichhane narrowly escaped.
Survivor Kumal said as he clung to the mango tree, he watched the house where he had been working disappear.
