We will die here: Nepal flood survivors recount desperate escapes as search for missing continues
Badri Prasad Devkota saw a wall of muddy water rushing towards the bus carrying him, his wife and 34 other pilgrims to the Hindu holy site of Gosainkunda in Nepal’s Rasuwa district.
“My wife grabbed my hand and pleaded, ‘Do not jump.’ I told her, ‘We will die here,’” Devkota told The Kathmandu Post. He broke free from her grip and jumped from the moving bus as the Bhotekoshi flood swept across the road at Bhainse in Nuwakot.
The wave knocked him into a roadside drain, but he clung to vegetation on the hillside. From there, he watched the bus disappear beneath the floodwaters.
The newspaper reported on Monday that two bodies had been recovered and 28 people remained missing from the group - one of them is Devkota’s wife.
The August 26 floods have left survivors facing the task of rebuilding their lives while thousands of families continue searching for missing loved ones. With hundreds dead and thousands still missing, accounts from those who escaped offer a glimpse of the suddenness and scale of the disaster.
After the flood subsided, Devkota and his cousin Tularam, who was among six passengers who survived by jumping from the bus, climbed about 20 metres up the hillside and spent two hours on a patch of grass.
They saw people stranded on rooftops and others buried in mud before climbing higher to a village named Hilekharka, where local residents offered them tea and biscuits and helped them obtain first aid.
The two returned to the Bhainse area the following day searching for their families, but found no trace of them before travelling back to their home district, Gorkha.
At Betrawati, Santaman Lama survived by heeding a warning, but lost almost everything he owned.
Lama told Onlinekhabar news portal on Sunday that he had taken his son and daughter to school on the morning of August 26 and was returning home when a nearby hardware-shop owner warned him that a flood was coming and told him to move uphill.
Warnings of flooding were not unusual in Betrawati, and Lama initially did not take the warning seriously. But he passed the message to his wife and the family moved to higher ground.
The first surge struck soon afterwards. Lama said the river swept his wife away and that he grabbed her and pushed her towards higher ground before clinging to bushes himself. From there, he watched the flood sweep away his house.
He also managed to pull two neighbours, Ishwarlal Shrestha and Buddhilal Dangol, to safety before losing contact with them, Onlinekhabar reported. Lama later contacted his children’s school and learned that both were safe. But his house, shop and almost everything he owned were gone. “I have nothing to eat or nowhere to stay,” Lama said. “That was everything I had.”
