A flood of tears on the Rosi

The Rosi Valley is a ravaged landscape of boulders, tree trunks, overturned tipper trucks, tilted concrete houses and the surrounding mountains with claw marks. A week later, survivors are still in shock.

Many who witnessed the 2015 earthquake say this disaster was worse, and it was made even more deadly because of unregulated quarries and stone mines in the Rosi watershed upstream. They blame collusion between contractors and municipality officials.

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Kumar Gurung, 54, was bailing out muddy water from inside his half-demolished house. He had bought the home only two days previously in the village of Bhaleswar with Rs3 million that his son, Dinesh, saved after working in Qatar.

“My son’s years of hard work were washed away in minutes by the Rosi,” said Gurung in a raspy voice due to fever.

Upriver in Panauti, Ganesh Dahal stares with his head resting on a hand, at what is left of his house which is buried by mud. This was the spot from where he had helped dig out the bodies of his 2 month old grand-daughter and daughter-in-law.

“It took just minutes for ten lives to be lost,” he says, explaining that he is counting his daughter-in-law, her baby, and eight goats which were also like family. Ganesh’s wife is weeping silently nearby as relatives console her.

Their daughter Puja had just come down a few days previously from her husband’s house to spend time with her parents. It was early morning on 28 September, and it had been raining constantly for two days already.

Puja had got up at dawn to feed her baby, given the goats fodder, when the mudslide hit the house and she raised the alarm. The whole family decided to move up the mountain for safety.

Ganesh’s daughter-in-law, Gopini, carried the baby and told Puja to run ahead. Just then a bigger slide buried them. “I was a little way behind, but saw the landslide take Gopini and the baby away,” Ganesh remembers.

The wall of mud also buried the home that he had rebuilt after it was damaged by the 2015 earthquake. His sons rushed home from Banepa, and started digging but it was not till the next morning that they found Gopini’s body still clasping the dead baby.

“No one helped us, neither the police nor the officials we elected to the municipality,” says Ganesh. “They still have not come.”

Homesteads in these mountains are scattered along the slopes, and help is hard to reach. Still, even a week later, no government agency has visited the village. The roads are damaged, so the family cannot even go anywhere.

At nearby Jorghatta village, Guman Singh has just retrieved household items from his home which was buried by a mudslide. Scattered around him are bottles of spices, cooking oil and some food.

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“It’s gone, everything is gone,” he mutters. “We heard it coming down, so we ran for safety. But we lost the house and everything in it.

Neighbour Namrata Nagarkoti’s house was also swept away. “It is like I am not conscious, and watching myself going about,” she says, still in shock of what has befallen her family.

There was a lot of commotion that morning from neighbours who shouted: “Run, run, there is a flood coming.” She and her family managed to climb to higher ground, but watched the flood take their home away.

“We had no time to take anything out,” she says. “We had just harvested the paddy and corn, we had some cash. We have nothing except the clothes we are wearing.”

The Rosi River has changed course and is now flowing through Tilak Tamang’s house which only has one wall left. His roadside eatery is filled with slushy mud. “We had no time to take anything out,” Tamang says. “I just have this T-shirt and half pants I am wearing. The Rosi took everything.”

Nearby, Dil Kumari Raut was luckier. She managed to save her livestock and her home, but her paddy field ready for harvest is all gone. “What is important is that I am alive,” she tells us.

Of the total 244 people who are so far known to have lost their lives in Nepal’s flood last week, 69 died only in the Rosi Valley. Of the 71 injured, most are still in Dhulikhel Hospital.

Some villagers had walked all day to Bhaleswar to get relief supplies and food, they were resting by the road and looked tired, hungry and traumatised.

Panauti Municipality is distributing 35kg of rice, 2kg dal, salt, and cooking oil to each family. But some of the villagers complained they got only half the rice.

“Most of the relief supplies are going to friends of the local officials and those living along the roads,” says Dinesh Gurung. “For us from up the mountains there is nothing.”

With Dasain around the corner, most villagers up here say they have nothing to eat, no safe drinking water, no electricity and no homes. “Where do we go now?” asks Indra Tamang. “Where is the government?”

Most villagers said they had never got the forecast warnings the Department of Meteorology put out about the heavy rainfall a week before the flood hit. Although most in Kathmandu had heard the warnings on the radio or phones, the information had not gotten up here in the mountains of Kavre.

“It was normal to expect rain, but we did not know it was going to be so heavy,” says Tanka Banjara, who is the disaster management coordinator for his ward council. “If we had been forewarned, we could have moved to safer places.”

Many seniors here do not recall rain and flood damage on this scale before. There was a flood in 1981 also, but the damage was not as bad. “Our village has become a cemetery. How can we survive here?” asks Ganesh Dahal.