Kathmandu, Aug 29: The images of a mud-covered elderly woman being carried to safety in the scoop of a digger have come to symbolise extraordinary accounts of survival in Nepal’s devastating flash floods.
The woman, 97-year-old Guna Maya Bohara, was pulled alive from the rubble of her care home after a four-hour rescue operation.
Her doctors say she is recovering in hospital, while her great-nephew Dipak told BBC Nepali that she looked like “a warrior” who had returned victorious from battle.
Hers is one of the many stories of survival from flood-ravaged areas of Nepal, where people fled collapsing settlements on Wednesday, seeking refuge on hillsides and spending nights stranded in forests before rescuers could reach them.
The death toll from the devastating flash floods crossed 650 on Saturday, while more than 2,400 were still missing.
Survivors of the floods described scenes of extraordinary terror – desperate climbs towards higher ground, homes collapsing around them and people being swept away.
For Raju Budhathoki, a customs agent in Timure, a town on the Nepal-Tibet border, the disaster began when the hillside suddenly started shaking Wednesday morning.
Budhathoki, who was resting in his room, initially thought an earthquake had struck, according to The Kathmandu Post.
He ran outside and towards a nearby police post, but found that the police themselves were fleeing. As he scrambled past a wire fence, he injured his hand.
Looking back, he saw houses in the Timure market being swept away one after another by the flood, with some disappearing into the river within seconds, the newspaper reported.
Budhathoki eventually reached a forest about 500 metres uphill, where he found safety. “From the forest, when I looked down at Timure, I never imagined I would get a second chance at life like this,” he told the newspaper from his hospital bed in Trishuli.
Another customs agent, Prakash Gautam, also escaped from Timure and spent the night in the forest.
Gautam told The Kathmandu Post that he heard a huge rumbling sound before the market was engulfed in darkness and the sky was covered by a black cloud. He ran from his room without knowing which way to go.
He injured the little toe of his left foot while fleeing, the newspaper reported, but eventually reached the forest above the settlement. From there, Gautam said, he could see bodies scattered and floating in the floodwaters and watch Timure being reduced to ruins.
Unable to be rescued during the day, Gautam and others spent Wednesday night in the forest. They survived on packets of noodles dropped by a Nepali Army helicopter, according to The Kathmandu Post.
Around 10 am on Thursday, another Army helicopter arrived and flew them to Bidur. “Only after boarding the helicopter did I feel that I had actually survived,” Gautam told the newspaper.
For Tulsi Bahadur Bhandari of Dolakha, survival came in an entirely different way.
According to The Kathmandu Post, Bhandari was trying to flee when a torrent of black mud and floodwater swept through the settlement. Houses began collapsing one after another as he ran.
The force of the flood struck Bhandari and threw him towards a hillside, the newspaper reported. “If the current had not thrown me towards the slope, I would not be alive today,” Bhandari told the newspaper from his hospital bed.
Another survivor, Sachin Khati, escaped the disaster almost by chance.
Khati, 33, along with his wife and four-year-old son, stayed with his maternal uncle Raj Kumar Diyali, who ran a jewellery business in Rasuwa.
On Wednesday morning, before the flood struck, Diyali sent Khati to Chilime for work. After hearing about the flood, Khati hurried back.
“When I hurried back after hearing about the flood, the village where I had been staying had already been swept away,” he told the Kantipur newspaper, adding that his wife, son and Diyali remain unaccounted for.
Twenty-one-year-old labourer Sujal Thapa is recovering at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu after he was rescued from Uttargaya village in Rasuwa district, one of the areas devastated by flash floods on Wednesday.
“I was sleeping and was not aware when the flood came. I was swept several metres away from my house, where security personnel found and rescued me hours later,” Thapa told the onlinekhabar.com news portal.
He suffered injuries to his leg, head and fingers after being swept towards the riverbank, where rescuers found him unconscious. His house had already been washed away by the flood.
Thapa does not know the whereabouts of his mother. His father, however, is still in a village in Rasuwa, and Thapa hopes to see him.
Dipak Tamang at first thought the ground was shaking. Then he saw a wall of water, mud and stones racing towards the houses along the Bhotekoshi river in Timure market, and realised there was nowhere to go but up.
Tamang, a resident of neighbouring Sindhupalchowk district, was in Timure, a town on the Nepal-Tibet border, when the flash flood struck on Wednesday.
“When I came out of the house and ran upward towards the hill, few houses had already collapsed due to the powerful flood,” he recalled, according to a report by Nepali news portal Onlinekhabar.
“There was not much choice for me. Behind me was the flood and in front of me was a wall-like hill,” Tamang said.
He ran towards the slope, struggling to climb what seemed like a wall. He fell several times, grabbing thorny bushes and stinging nettles to pull himself higher. “It was my last race between life and death,” he said.
People were running in different directions as the flood surged below them. Each time he fell, Tamang thought it might be the last moment of his life.
Eventually, he reached the top of the hill. From there, he saw people being swept away by the flood. Among them were his friends. “I could do nothing when my friends were swept away by the wave before my eyes,” he recalled.
Tamang eventually found an old go-down used for storing wood in the forest, where dozens of other people who had managed to save themselves had also taken refuge. He spent the night there without a bed as rain continued to fall, waiting for rescuers. He was rescued about 24 hours later.
