Landslide and flash flood leave 1,400 dead in Nepal

A landslide and glacial collapse-triggered flash flood on the China-Nepal border have killed 1,400 people and left 5,000 missing, including two Estonian tourists, ERR reported. Nearly three weeks after the disaster, the situation remains unclear because of the region’s isolation and political restrictions.

The disaster struck a valley near the Gyirong border crossing on the morning of August 26. Shortly before 8 a.m. Nepal time, a 32-member group led by yoga instructor Viktorija Darakova was exercising there. Two Estonian women were among the group.

About 40 minutes later, a landslide occurred in the mountains at an altitude of roughly five kilometres. Approximately half of the mountain collapsed, pulling a glacier with it and striking a river. The mass then surged down the valley at an estimated speed of about 50 metres per second.

It took seven minutes for the flow to reach the first inhabited settlement. Over a route of nearly 100 kilometres, a wall of ice, water, mud, rocks and debris passed through the view of several cameras. Bridges and villages were swept away, while trucks and people were carried off or buried in mud. Only a few people managed to climb up the valley slopes.

Reports of the disaster in the high mountains reached Nepal’s capital within minutes, but the full scale of the destruction remained unknown because both communications and access had been cut off.

Nava Raj Dahal, Estonia’s honorary consul in Nepal, was among the first to hear about the disaster. Dahal, a tourism entrepreneur who also organises trips to the holy mountain Kailash, said he immediately contacted Nepal’s police, tourism authority, foreign ministry, interior ministry and local authorities after learning that two Estonians were missing.

Four days after the disaster, hundreds of desperate people gathered outside a national hospital in Kathmandu, searching for information about relatives. Many family members had flown in from abroad and were trying to reach the disaster zone upstream.

Among them was Suresh, a 50-year-old entrepreneur from India who lives in the United States. He was searching for his wife, who had been on a pilgrimage in the region. He said she had sent him a photograph from the border between Tibet and Nepal while travelling with her group towards Kailash. Suresh said he was trying to reach military camps to find out whether she had been located or rescued.

A Latvian group was taking part in a similar pilgrimage. It included the two Estonian women and was led by Latvian yoga instructor and lifestyle influencer Viktorija Darakova, whose work as a content creator means the trip was extensively documented.

The group included 65-year-old Maria Aleksandrova, a long-serving family doctor from Ida-Viru County, and 58-year-old Tallinn hairdresser Katrin Saar. They left Riga on August 8 for a three-week tour of Nepal and Tibet, whose highlight was a pilgrimage around Kailash, a mountain under Chinese control in Tibet.