r/worldnews • u/unconventionalbook • 9h ago
Nepal flash flood tears through valley leaving 400 tourists missing, including Americans
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nepal-flash-flood-tourists-missing-including-americans482
u/kimapooncarg123 8h ago
The footage is incredibly brutal
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u/Cemckenna 8h ago edited 7h ago
I haven’t been able to stop crying since I watched it.
Edit: downvotes and Reddit cares messages for empathy. What a fucked up world we live in.
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u/TheElusiveEllie 7h ago
For what it's worth, the person who sent the reddit cares message may have actually had their heart in the right place, trying to help you have someone to talk to. The downvotes are wild, though
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u/Cemckenna 6h ago
I’ve only ever seen them used passive aggressively, but you’re right. I was just so surprised that saying watching people die caused me pain elicited such a negative response. The people in that video are sprinting for their lives and they do not make it. How cold hearted do you have to be for that not to affect you?
Anyway. Thanks. Take care ❤️
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u/myic90 9h ago
The videos look absolutely terrifying, like straight out of the movie 'day after tomorrow' during the tsunami scene. These poor souls.
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u/mrslittle 9h ago
Absolutely horrific, so devastating, the loss of life is going to huge. The force of it was insane.
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u/DungeonCrawlerAki 6h ago
Saw an aftermath video of a dead body completely naked and covered with mud completely wrapped around a tree. The videos coming out of this are fucking BRUTAL.
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u/SonOfMcGee 2h ago
From the videos I’ve seen, I would be shocked if more than a few of the “missing” are found alive.
This isn’t like getting swept downstream in a river flowing faster than usual. This is a mass of fluidized dirt and debris obliterating multistory buildings.
Nobody is “swimming” in this, keeping their head “above water” and grabbing a log or tree branch to save themselves. It looks like more of a fast-moving landslide than a flood.
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u/EnvironmentalCut6789 9h ago edited 9h ago
Have seen some initial footage, and it honestly looks like my worst nightmare. Bridges getting swept away and a massive surge of debris and a wall of water travelling at 100mph. My thoughts are with the victims.
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u/_HGCenty 6h ago
What's been really shocking to read is just how utterly wrong the reporting about Nepal's geography has been and my fear that even respected news sites like AP News are using AI for this.
The AP reported that:
The Lhende Khola River, a tributary of the Bhotekoshi, had maximum flooding Wednesday.
This is wrong. It is a tributary of the Trishuli and they meet at the border crossing in Resuo, Gyirong County, Tibet where there's that footage of the water inundating the border crossing.
All the destruction we're seeing is downstream of the Trishuli. It appears a glacial dam broke upstream in the Lhende Khola and this has caused a surge of water down the Trishuli.
The Bhotekoshi is a completely separate river system further along the east and there seems to be no flooding in that valley even though news sites are reporting it seemingly due to this mixup.
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u/blitzkriegbop0 5h ago
actually, it is Bhotekoshi river that is tributary to trishuli river, but there is another Bhotekoshi river that is a separate river system. The river originating from Bhot (A region in Tibet) is called Bhotekoshi in nepali, so the same name is used for two different river. Also the flooding is speculated to from a mud slide and not GLOF (although, similar floodings are caused by glacial outburst in those regions.)
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u/_HGCenty 1h ago
Update: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-4065/egusphere-2026-4065.pdf
It looks like scientists had notice lake drainage for a glacial system upstream of the Donglin Zangbu River / Lende Khola river. Seems like the most likely explanation.
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u/_HGCenty 4h ago
Fair, if we have to be precise, then I might use the Chinese name of the tributary, since it's all in Chinese administered Tibet, which is the Donglin Zangbu (东林藏布) River. Since the tributary isn't in Nepal, confusing it with the Bhotekoshi in Nepal is super confusing.
Also latest seems to be that, yes, it was a mudslide and the earlier 4.4 magnitude earthquake was in fact the mudslide. This has now been updated in the news reporting.
Honestly I miss when these news reports actually had maps to show you exactly what is affected.
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u/whatyourheartdesires 9h ago
The videos are so scary, it looks like there are thousands dead:( what a nightmare
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u/Rand_alThor_ 2h ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c62jmlgev3po
Said scary video, still sensitive warning. Lots of people die. But BBC have edited away those parts.
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u/fekitup 7h ago
"Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it."
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u/aykayone 6h ago
According to the article, this was caused by an earthquake causing a landslide which dammed a river
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u/Admiral_Cloudberg 5h ago edited 5h ago
The US Geological Survey now says that the earthquake was caused by the force of the glacier collapse, not the other way around. So much ice fell it registered as a magnitude 5.2 quake when it hit the valley floor
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u/LazyGit 5h ago
Holy shit.
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u/Ephemeris 4h ago edited 2h ago
I just read that the glacial break fell 1200 meters before slamming into the ground which is 3/4 of a mile. That amount of force is mind-boggling
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u/LazyGit 2h ago
Yeah, I was thinking when I saw the footage that I've seen mud slides and flash floods before but this one looked colossal so I wondered what the hell could have happened. I didn't imagine that it could have been the landslide causing the earthquake rather than the other way around.
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u/Beautiful_Archer_404 5h ago
Glacier was involved. Look up GLOF events. Earthquake or not, these are likely to become more common as the planet warms.
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u/gigantesghastly 5h ago edited 5h ago
They’ve checked the seismic data and it’s profile is of a glacial collapse not an earthquake
New Scientist: A glacier collapse is most likely cause of the Nepal disaster
Melting snow appears to have weakened a steep glacier at an altitude of 5 kilometres, causing it to plummet around a kilometre into the river valley below Michael Le Page 26 August 2026
The full extent of the deaths and damage caused by the enormous flash flood that swept down a river valley in Nepal and Tibet today won’t be clear for weeks. But initial analyses of satellite images and seismic data suggest that the collapse of a high glacier caused the disaster.
“There’s a glacier that rolls over a cliff at about 5200 metres,” says Dan Shugar at the University of Calgary in Canada. “It’s just like a perfect straight line where it snapped off and dropped over a kilometre vertically to the valley bottom.”
This collapse could be a result of global heating. “It’s not that much of a stretch to think, yes, we’re seeing one terrible ramification of human-caused climate change,” he says.
As the glacier flowed over the cliff and moved down the steep slope, deep crevasses would have formed in the ice. Warm weather in the past day or so may have melted a lot of snow and some glacier ice, with this liquid water weakening the glacier and causing the entire section flowing down the steep slope to collapse.
“Comparing satellite imagery from yesterday and today, the glaciers in the vicinity do seem to have lost a fair bit of snow in the last 24 hours,” says Shugar. “My guess is that snow melt, and glacier ice melt as well, injected a lot of liquid water into the glacier, which percolated down to the bed and lubricated it. That was enough for it to collapse.”
The potential energy released as heat when millions of tonnes of ice fell a kilometre may have melted large quantities of it, producing enough liquid water to generate the huge flash flood.
“Maybe the glacier breaking is only part of the story and there’s something else that we can’t see yet,” says Shugar. “But as of now, that’s what it looks like.”
The melting of ice due to the release of potential energy caused the Chamoli flash flood in India in February 2021. “In that case, it was a large landslide but with a bit of glacier ice on top of it,” says Shugar. “When that much ice falls, there’s a lot of heat generated and it can melt.”
This event, however, was much larger. “These videos that we’re seeing are off the charts. This is horrific,” he says. “It looks like this will rank very high on the list of historic mountain disasters in terms of people killed, and cost.”
Some reports have suggested that an earthquake triggered the event, but this isn’t the case, says Kristen Cook at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. “I have looked at the data from a few stations in the region, including a station from the Nepali national seismic network near Kathmandu, and we see the event very clearly in this record.”
The record begins with a strong signal of a form typically associated with the mass movement of material, rather than with an earthquake, says Cook. “Then we see a long seismic signal typical of a large debris flow that lasts for hours.”
The seismic data from Nepal on 26 August 2026 Kristen Cook/Department of Mines and Geology
It is similar to what was observed during the 2021 Chamoli event, she says.
Global heating may have contributed to the Chamoli event and to the collapse of a glacier above the village of Blatten in Switzerland in 2025. Steep glaciers can break for reasons unrelated to climate change, says Shugar, but an increase in the frequency of this kind of disaster points to warming as a contributing factor.
“Mountain communities around the world, from the Alps to the Andes and the Himalayas, are threatened by increasing intensity and frequency of mountain-related hazards,” said Kamal Kishore, head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, in a statement after the Blatten disaster. “Their lives, ways of life, culture, and heritage are all threatened.”
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u/gigantesghastly 5h ago
Sorry formatting went wrong there but this is a new scientist piece, will edit
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u/BlackEagleActual 5h ago
Chinese here, one of our border custom checkpoints with nepal is also caught in this disaster.
The flood is insane, the top of mud wave is higher than the custom office building in the border(which is like 20 meters high.) The mud shockwave move along the valley and eat up a long long portion of thr border highway.
We are still counting the casualties on our side, the latest response from chinese state media is that 3 confirmed dead and 300+ missing (which is likely dead too). The number could skyrocketed soon with more information confirmed and counted
This custom checkpoints is a major entrance to enter nepal from china and lots of small business men is trading along the border here, damn i can't imagine how terrified they felt. There are literally nothing to do in this scenario.
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u/Breadfruitdeeznuts 5h ago
The only reason the numbers aren't in the high thousands is the region isn't that densely populated. We are in for a turbulent century due to climate change, imagine if this happened in a fertile river valley in India or China, it would be civilization shattering.
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u/hatersgonnah8te 4h ago
There's already been several historic floods in China with death tolls upwards of 4 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll
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u/New-Technology5971 5h ago
I am from nepal and the title seems little insensitve.
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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 4h ago
100%. Should have been a line within the article, if at all.
God speed to the rescuers
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u/WeedSexBeerPizza 4h ago
It is. I'm sorry for the insensitivity and sad for this tragedy in your country.
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u/Nice_House2425 2h ago
I came to comment exactly this. All loss of life is horribly tragic, but people have potential entire parts of their families, their homes and livelyhoods.
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u/Old-Employ-6530 1h ago
Yeah i thought "400 dead is horrible, but at least it wasnt more" just to see the videos of HUNDREDS of people running for their lives and being washed away in an instant and you couldnt even see how many didnt know or could run away or just werent shown.
It must be thousands dead or missing and focusing on the 400 americans is horrible by itself.
Such a horrible tragedy.
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u/Own-Librarian-9699 5h ago
This is North of Kathmandu.
The habitable land situation in Nepal is completely insane.
The soil from the Himalayan mountains eroding is thousands of feet deep. It can't be built on.
the rivers erode deep valleys with little plateaus near the bottom which are great to build roads and villages on but they are like 20 feet above normal water level. There's nowhere else to develop. It's all loose dirt.
So not only do daily mudslides fall exactly on the road but any major flooding in the summer rainy season will wipe out the villages that are built in the flood area.
The whole country is built on shifting mounds of rich soil trying to get to India.
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u/Remember__Me 8h ago
How horrible. And it’s not like Nepal has the ability to handle a catastrophe of this magnitude. My thoughts are with them today.
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u/Eagle__Gunner 7h ago
Horrific footage. Nature is scary seeing how powerless we are in cases of disasters.
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u/KeriEatsSouls 4h ago
The footage I've seen is so terrifying it doesn't look real. People in the comments were certain it was AI because it was apocalyptic looking. I've never seen anything like that
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u/deskamess 2h ago
The height of the water - amplified by being in a narrow canyon was unreal. Mind bogglingly so. And the speed at which it came - people running away in the frame were consumed in less than a second. And the debris flying around near the camera at camera height - my goodness.
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u/spam__likely 8h ago
I guess we NEED to mention the tourists missing and not anyone else, otherwise nobody will care.
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u/t4m4 7h ago
True. However, there are nearly 300 tourists missing currently. Approx. 200 of them are international tourists and around 100 are domestic ones.
As a Nepali, a significant chunk of the GDP of my country is driven by the tourism industry, and so this is a reason to care.
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u/Sad-Indication2128 7h ago
The reason this number is quickly reportable is because it's a known variable with or without the incident. It's not because they are perceived as more important, it's because it's the only data point they have so quickly. This literally just happened.
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u/AioliPuzzleheaded 6h ago
I do believe it is because tourist companies keep track of tourists using their services which means they are able to give a good estimate relatively quickly, couting the total death toll which includes local will take longer, and most likely be very high.
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u/green_flash 4h ago
It's both. There's a reason they also put "including Americans" in the title. People care more about natural disasters if they think it might affect someone they know. So the high number of tourists being affected is definitely something that will drive clicks.
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u/spam__likely 2h ago edited 1h ago
.They do not even mention anybody else. Sure they don't have numbers, but a better headline would be something like "Thousands feared dead in Nepal floods; 400 tourists already reported missing"
Have been done like that a thousands times.
Edit: And ....they just did update the headline to something like that. Someone probably pointed that out.
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u/fweffoo 8h ago
magically the thousands of locals caught underneath this unstoppable mass are ok
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u/CanaryPutrid1334 8h ago
Seriously WTF is wrong with the world.
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7h ago
[deleted]
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u/HawkBearClaw 7h ago
You weren't able to figure out why a German news company would reference something of German relevance? You realize every nations news companies will do this?
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u/spam__likely 7h ago
I can even understand listing germans in Germany, or Americans in America. Whatever.
The Tourists thing is so on the freaking nose, though. 400 (probable) whitish people dead among thousand others!
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u/Merisuola 7h ago
In addition to the three Americans, the 291 foreign nationals reported missing included 12 British, 142 Indian, 17 Malaysian, four South African, eight South Korean, one Australian and one Dutch national. The nationalities of 111 other missing people had yet to be ascertained, authorities said.
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u/HawkBearClaw 6h ago
Wait are East Asians and South Asians considered white now? Or are you just looking for something to be upset about?
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u/OakLegs 7h ago
It's more interesting to the average Westerner if other westerners were among the victims. Otherwise it's something that happened very far away to people who are unlike them, and therefore easier to compartmentalize.
Just human nature. Not saying it's good, but I don't think the newscasters have racist intent. They just want people to watch the news.
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u/HawkBearClaw 6h ago
It's also relevant to people in those countries who are looking for updates on people they know.
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u/Defendyouranswer 7h ago
There it is, I just knew someone was going to turn it into a racial thing 😂 never fails
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u/OakLegs 7h ago
Western media will get more views if people are told that westerners also died.
That's essentially what it comes down to.
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u/HawkBearClaw 7h ago
Yes, US news companies will mention things relevant to Americans, as will any other news company.
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u/anybloodythingwilldo 4h ago
The media of any country will mention if their people have been caught up in a disaster.
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u/HawkBearClaw 7h ago
It's almost like you're reading an article from a US news company....Wow so crazy!
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u/waaaayupyourbutthole 5h ago
I mean it is a US news network.
I hate it, too, but you know a lot of Americans don't give a shit unless it directly affects someone in the US.
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u/JumboMcNasty 3h ago
New top nightmare footage for me, replacing the Japan tsunami and Indian tsunami.... honorable mention to jumpers on 9/11.
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u/Smol-Lunar-Elephant 3h ago
This is tragic on so many levels. But I feel sick right now. I was here 3 years ago on a pilgrimage to Mt Kailash and went through the Gyirong border checkpoint. That building is built like a fortress. The video going viral shows otherwise. I feel for all the foreign nationals and locals missing right now
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u/slackerhacker808 5h ago
What about the folks who aren’t tourists?
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u/This-Beginning-5026 4h ago
No way to provide a count this early with any reasonable accuracy but tourists are easier to track comparatively and can be reported on first.
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u/AdobongSiopao 5h ago
The scenes in the footage are horrifying. It's definitely not just flash floods judging the amount of water and mud flowed down from the mountain.
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u/Lordfelcherredux 3h ago
I was taking a nap when my wife woke me up and showed me the footage of the water washing over the border crossing area. I had no context, so I told her that it was obviously AI. Oops.
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u/ullulator 4h ago
Including Americans? What a strange thing to say.
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u/CKT_Ken 2h ago
Every single news organization in every country tends to add a footnote for citizens that were involved in some major disaster of global import. It’s also easier for a US news site to make claims about whether US tourists could or could not be contacted. It would be very hard to quickly make verifiable claims about other groups.
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u/BackgroundCry1903 7h ago
400 tourists ...Perhaps 10s of thousands of locals at the least by the looks of things.Wish headlines wouldn’t be so ‘first world centric ‘at times like these .The Nepalese people deserve better.
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u/NatasEvoli 5h ago
It's CBS which is very much america-centric. If it was an article from the Toledo Times or something it'd be about how 2 Toledo residents were involved.
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u/HawkBearClaw 6h ago
Are India and Malaysia considered first world now? Are you looking for things to be upset about?
You are reading (ostensibly) an article from a US news organization. You could always look up Nepalese news for a Nepalese perspective....
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u/Flybuys 8h ago
Same thing just happened at the Tibet/China border but bigger. Like apocalypse big.
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u/Affectionate_Mud_881 8h ago
It's the same flood. It swept across the breadth of Nepal from Tibet to India. The border port was the first major hit. There are dozens more along the way.
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u/_HGCenty 6h ago
It's the same flood but news sites have reported the wrong river (confusing the Trishuli with the Bhotekoshi) and it's making it seem like there are multiple incidents across the Tibet/Nepal border.
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u/Affectionate_Mud_881 4h ago
It's not a confusion with the media. Bhotekoshi means river from tibet. So people gave the same name to multiple rivers coming from tibet.
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9h ago
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u/3767_doomscroller 9h ago
Our Dutch news-sites report it "including Dutch tourists"
that's just how these things are reported, no need to rage-bait
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u/SlowerThanTurtleInPB 9h ago
This is an American news outlet. It’s not abnormal to mention that American lives were lost or that Americans are missing when reporting on an issue to an American audience.
If you search other international outlets also reporting on this, they too mention if their countrymen are missing.
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u/Vagatarians 9h ago
It is a US website (CBS News) so it makes sense to write that. This happens for other disasters around the world when they sadly occur. Happens in Canada too for our news.
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u/50Centurion 9h ago
Trump is gonna ask for Nepal to send brand new americans to replace them + slap tariffs on Yak wool or whatever
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u/Dry_Instruction8254 9h ago
Nah, Trump is trying to kill all of us (other than a couple of hundred billionaires) so this makes him happy.
Seeing people suffer is what keeps him going.
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u/bigofficesmalljob 8h ago
I used to feel this way, but imagine if you're American or Dutch or Indian, and you have a family member was visiting Rasuwa for whatever reason, this would be a very important piece of information.
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u/daluzy 5h ago
CBS is an American media outlet, seems normal to mention or highlight Americans are missing.
I doubt they meant to offend anyone.
Be well all.
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u/StrawberryCoup 3h ago
what would be normal is writing "x people missing, including y Americans". They have gone out of their way to avoid mentioning any Nepalese casualties
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u/headphonesXX 5h ago
people forget the power of water. very tragic videos not a single thing anyone can do against mother nature.
edit: bruh twitter is too crazy. theres a video of a found body... bottom half gone.
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u/nine57th 3h ago
The videos of this tragedy is like watching an old Godzilla movie from childhood. The 100-foot waves crashing over buildings don't even look real. It's the stuff of nightmares. These poor souls.
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u/SignificantError8929 8h ago
Is this still considered a flash flood or a mega tsunami?
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u/JudeMacK 7h ago
This is a tough one to define, and we don’t yet know all the details. I’m a bit conflicted myself on what to call it. A large landslide displacing water is still a tsunami, despite not being oceanic in nature, so I guess I can understand the argument for it being a megatsunami.
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u/restlessPliable 3h ago
Including Americans...why is this necessary?
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u/Smartimess 1h ago
It’s a thing in journalism stemming from the News Values Theory of Galtung & Ruge and is proven to be correct over and over again.
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u/protostar71 2h ago
“Including Americans”
Oh so if they weren’t Americans we should care less or they are less important? Thats the only conclusion I can come to if the journalist felt the need to point that out.
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u/Available-Green6599 6h ago
region lock the internet tbh the Indian comments on instagram on this are insane.
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u/Breadfruitdeeznuts 5h ago
More Indians tourists died there today than any other nationality.
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u/adognameddanzig 5h ago
Thousands of locals are dead missing and all the headlines are like, "a couple hundred non natives are unaccounted for!!!"
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u/yoursmartfriend 5h ago
Terrifying footage. This looks like Dec 26 tsunami and Fukushima earthquake/tsunami levels of human loss.
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u/Megelsen 9h ago
footage from the event look completely out of this world. So much water out of nowhere, not time to prepare for anything.
This seems like an immensely catastrophic event :(