"The mountain fell on top of us"

Shyam Lama had just fallen asleep on the early morning of 28 September when he heard a loud bang outside his shop on the side of the highway in Dhading, 15km from Kathmandu.

It had been raining incessantly for two days, landslips and fallen trees had blocked the Kathmandu-Mugling highway. Many buses were stranded, and some of them were parked at a bend on the road in Jhyaple Khola, waiting for the debris to be cleared.

The bang that Lama heard was another landslide from the mountain above falling near his shop and covering the highway with 4m of mud and stones. Some of the buses were damaged, and injured passengers were running for safety in the darkness and pouring rain.

In the light of dawn, they could see the damaged buses heading to Kathmandu from the west. But it was not till later in the day that Lama and some of the other rescuers saw the top of another bus sticking out of the mud.

They dug through the slush to find 11 bodies. But then they spotted the tyre of another vehicle, then a van. Altogether 35 passengers perished that night in the three buses heading to Kathmandu from Chitwan, Butwal and Gorkha. 

“The buses were all stuck because the highway was blocked, and the landslide fell and buried them with the passengers sleeping inside,” Lama says. “If the debris up the road had been cleared in time, the buses would have been able to continue on to Kathmandu.”

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Archana Koirala runs a convenience store nearby, and was also awoken by muffled shouts for help almost drowned out by the sound of the rain on the tin roof.

“In the darkness, I saw people escaping from two buses, some of them injured and covered in blood,” recalls Koirala. “I gathered up my little girls and ran for my life.”

Another shop owner Ajita Tamang, heard the landslide coming down and nearly burying her house. She ran with her mother to the nearby woods. Her shop did not survive.

Krishna Tamang heard the sound of a bus windshield shattering, and went outside to check.  He saw one of the buses half-buried in debris before it disappeared before his eyes, swallowed up by a fresh wave of mud. Unable to do anything to help, he ran up the mountain to save his own life. 

Shop owners and residents in Jhyaple Khola say that the landslide was so massive and came down so suddenly that the passengers in the vehicles probably did not even know what hit them.

A week later, the mangled mass of the three buses are all that remain on the roadside, and excavators were trying to open the road for the expected heavy Dasain traffic on the arterial highway that connects Kathmandu to western Nepal.

A visit to the site shows the mountain above scarred by open red wounds of landslides. The biggest slope failure originates in a local road about 100m above the highway and has brought down debris that was just dumped over the edge by bulldozers. When the record-breaking rain came, the mud turned into paste and raced down the mountain carrying tree trunks and large stones.  

Typically, Dasain is the busiest time of year for businesses along the highway in Jhyaple Khola as people leave Kathmandu by busloads to get home for the festival. “We do not stay here for long anymore, we are already home before the sun sets,” says Krishna Tamang. “We fear another landslide will hit us at any time.”

In July, a debris flow swept two intercity buses into the Trisuli River along the Mugling-Narayangad Highway 60km west of here. Of the 62 passengers on the two buses, only three were able to swim to safety. Search and rescue teams recovered 27 passengers from the river in the aftermath of the landslide, but neither the buses nor the rest of the passengers have been found. 

A committee formed by the government to investigate the Simaltal disaster concluded that a new local road constructed farther up the mountain was mainly responsible for the debris flow. The Jhyaple Khola mudslide was a repeat of the July disaster.

Locals in Dhading say that the Department of Roads had just completed the retaining wall, and the debris from the excavation done to construct the road had piled up, which the rain swept down to the highway below. 

Similar unplanned roads constructed further above in Nagdhunga have also clogged up the culverts, which remain uncleared. 

“This disaster occurred because of the locally elected representatives, the Road Department and the contractors,” says local business owner Shyam Kumar Lama. “You cannot blame it on a natural disaster."

“They keep tearing down the retaining walls to build haphazard roads, and replace them with brick walls,” adds Lama. “How is a barely one-foot-thick wall going to stop a landslide?”

Geologist Sri Kamal Dwivedi says that the Department of Roads has not heeded the geological risks in excavations for road expansion across the country.

“The soil above Jhyaple Khola was loosened by torrential rain, causing a high-speed debris flow onto the highway below,”  explains Dwivedi. “Additionally, the possibility of disasters like landslides increases when slopes are cut to make way for road expansion.”

Transport expert Kamal Pandey says that disasters like the ones in Simaltal and Jhyaple Khola happen frequently because environmental risks are ignored during investments in road expansion.

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“New roads are dug up like it is some kind of competition,” says Pandey. “But as long as unmanaged excavation continues without plans in place to mitigate landslides, disasters like the one at Jhyaple Khola will continue to happen.”

Indeed, this is not the first time a disaster of this scale has struck in Jhyaple Khola. In 2001, a similar debris flow from higher up the hill buried a vehicle on the highway below, killing nine people. 

Landslides of smaller scales occur in the area every monsoon, but they do not make it to the news. But even as they are used to the frequent landslides, there is now a new kind of fear among residents. 

“I am overcome with terror every time I look up to the overcast sky,” says Shyam Lama. “We will never be safe in this place as long as the mountains keep falling on top of us.”