Floods Devastate Nepalese Town, Leaving Many Dead and Missing

BIDUR, Nepal — The town of Bidur in Nepal’s Nuwakot district has been devastated by last week’s catastrophic floods, crushing hopes for finding more survivors. The stench of death is overwhelming as workers, dressed in white hazmat suits, unload bodies from a stream of ambulances. These bodies are placed onto blue tarps in a cordoned-off area. Helicopters, usually used for commercial tours, are now focused on delivering aid and returning with survivors in need of medical attention.

Kalpana Shrestha, a nurse from Kathmandu, is in despair. Her family is deeply affected, with ten members missing, including her two sisters and their children. She has shared their photos extensively, hoping for news, yet no response has come. Shrestha expressed her anguish, saying, “I have posted so much that my fingers started shaking and trembling. My mind has stopped working. But even so, we have not stopped posting.”

The disaster has claimed more than 1,000 lives in Nepal, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. Over 3,915 people are still missing, with 583 of them being foreign nationals. In Tibet, reports indicate 16 fatalities and 546 missing. Among those missing in Nepal are at least 80 Americans. To date, over 10,000 individuals have been rescued, including 252 foreigners, as the United Nations reports. The calamity, initiated by a glacier collapse and landslide at the Nepal-China border, stands as the deadliest natural event in Nepal since the April 2015 earthquake that took around 9,000 lives.

Shrestha criticizes the government for insufficient search and rescue efforts to find her family. Despite her brothers’ attempts to reach the village, access remains nearly impossible due to destroyed roads. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs highlights access as a major hurdle, with roads only passable up to Bidur and sections of the highway to Kathmandu remaining blocked.

The task of managing recovered bodies presents a substantial challenge. Nepal’s disaster management agency is utilizing 21 hospitals across several districts to store the remains. Bodies are being buried to mitigate infection risks, with an intention to identify and return them to families later.

Nabin Karki, a police superintendent, explained that authorities are collecting DNA samples and displaying photographs of the bodies, seeking identification by family members. Relatives of the missing can provide blood samples for DNA testing. Should a match be identified, authorities plan to return bodies from burial sites to families for proper funerals.

The article coverage by Janis Mackey Frayer and Dawn Liu in Bidur, with additional reporting by Michael Fiorentino and Surendra Phuyal in Kathmandu, and Sunil Pandey from Pokhara.