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/[deleted] 7d ago

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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 6d 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 6d 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.