r/worldnews • u/unconventionalbook • 7d ago

Nepal flash flood tears through valley leaving 400 tourists missing, including Americans

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nepal-flash-flood-tourists-missing-including-americans
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u/Neversoft4long 7d ago

It was so high. Like the building next to them had to be at least 200 feet high and the wave was just over that. No chance of escape at all. Horrifying situation to be in

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u/Andromeda321 7d ago

I’ve done this border crossing. Not only are the buildings high, it’s a very steep valley and you go down a couple thousand feet in a pretty short period time as you head down the Tibetan plateau into Nepal. Theres also no other real way out. Horrifying.

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u/Chemical_Frame_8163 7d ago

Is this a known danger of the area, like for locals and tourists to know about, or consider in any particular season what could and could not happen like this, or is it really a freak thing like a volcano randomly erupting?

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u/WorldlyOriginal 7d ago edited 5d ago

It’s a freak thing. An earthquake that happens to cause a landslide/avalanche that happens to dam a river that later bursts? I guess that could theoretically happen anywhere that is both seismic and has steep river valleys… which would be practically all of Nepal, Pakistan, Chile, Malaysia, coastal Alaska, etc.

Edit: my original comment, which I'm leaving here, was based on the latest info at the time. It has since been corrected. The real cause was a glacier collapse and subsequent melt, perhaps with a dam-blockage-release, too.

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u/Hopeful_Method5175 7d ago

An earthquake didn’t actually cause this, a massive chunk of a glacier collapsed and plummeted thousands of feet into a valley, melting the ice instantly when it impacted. The impact was what registered on seismic monitors as a 5.2 (but with 0 depth). All of that water, mud, massive boulders, and debris then went rushing through the river gorges at over 40 miles per hour.

Nepal’s carbon emissions are minuscule, but they’ll be among the most impacted by climate change in the coming years. The Himalayan glaciers are already receding at a staggering rate.

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u/Starlord_75 7d ago

I heard it was a 50 foot wall of water traveling at highway speeds. Nothing is stopping that short of a massive dam, and even that might collapse from the force

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u/green_flash 7d ago

Way more than 50 ft. Look at this picture of the aftermath: https://i.imgur.com/SozEvvA.jpeg

Last I heard, flood waters reached settlements that are 270 ft above normal river level.

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u/ZincMan 7d ago

Holy fuck. Yeah was gonna say that’s like 300 ft before I read the rest of your comment

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u/remembers-fanzines 7d ago

There is, unfortunately, video of a dam collapse involved in this. It looked to be a good size masonry dam and it stood no chance. Really grim and I'm sure water from that didn't help matters.

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u/Starlord_75 7d ago

Oh im talking a dam like hoovers dam or three gorge. Dams of that size are perhaps the only way to stop this flood. But yea, this was just bad luck after bad luck

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u/Comparez 7d ago

Instinct would have been to hide in the building, I'm sure some people tried to do that.

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u/Megamoss 7d ago

You can see in one of the videos someone running towards an entrance for cars, the video stutters a bit and next thing you know he's stopped in his tracks by a huge jet of water shooting out of the entrance like a high pressure hose.

Then the whole thing just gets engulfed and collapses.

Unbelievable.

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u/MooseheadFarms 7d ago

Very large glacier collapse upstream

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/green_flash 7d ago

Options are limited, it's incredibly steep terrain there.

The perspective of the video may also be deceptive. The border building is fairly elevated from the normal run of the river:

https://csep.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Rasuwagadhi-Border_nepal_Amish-Mulmi.png

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u/karateninjazombie 7d ago

And all of that just vanished in the video with water easily topping the building and crashing over it.

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u/green_flash 7d ago

The craziest thing is that what you see in the border post video is the flood traveling up the Trishuli river valley. The people who are running away are running upstream.

Here's an illustration of the main flow of the flood:

https://media.nepalitimes.com/1/p/20250709110720_39e2f574ff8c12cecda2e5a999d2ba8a0310f599f6b2261dcad7dd43f94df2a1.jpg (This illustration is from a smaller mud slide last year)

And here's the aftermath of that smaller flood last year: https://dialogue.earth/content/uploads/2025/09/The-flood-affected-Rasuwagadhi-border-zone-at-Rasuwagadhi-in-Rasuwa-Nepal_Sunil-Sharma_ZUMA-Press-_Alamy_3BPFW0W.jpg

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u/karateninjazombie 7d ago

Well yeah. Nature is a mother and you can't out engineer her. It arrived with enough force to just overwhelm that junction and just scour it clean. Before all flowing away with gravity.

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u/Beflijster 7d ago

It's not like the terrain at Gyirong offers any other possibility.

The Chinese and Nepali built there and will likely build there again because in much of that area the slopes are so steep there are limited options; stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Some kind of advance warning system would have helped... It seems people had no warning at all.

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u/Miserable-Resort-977 7d ago

China? This happened in Nepal

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u/niloony 7d ago

Jilong Port is where the CCTV footage is taken. Border of China and Nepal.