r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MrOrangeMagic • Aug 26 '26

Video Flash Floods hit Nepalese-Chinese border region, hundreds missing including 384 foreign nationals NSFW

25k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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1.1k

u/whatsagoinon1 Aug 26 '26

Wtf happened? Where did all that water suddenly come from?

1.3k

u/WRX_STD Aug 26 '26

an earthquake that caused a rock-ice avalanche, blocking the Lhende River and sending a sudden, catastrophic surge of water downstream

499

u/Mnm0602 Aug 26 '26

Nature occasionally reminds us how insignificant we are, so sad for those people. Most in that video didn’t survive I’m sure.

178

u/Desperate_Box1875 Aug 26 '26

Most?!!

123

u/choff22 Aug 26 '26

Understatement of the century?

51

u/WeAreLivinTheLife Aug 26 '26

Not "most", no one

-19

u/jabol321 Aug 26 '26

Not even one person that didn't survive? That's good news actually

-4

u/palmerry Aug 26 '26

Millennium

11

u/SomewhereAtWork Aug 26 '26

There is always one lucky bastard, that will spend the rest of his life asking himself why only he survived.

2

u/Valendr0s Aug 26 '26

I'm a bit afraid I died in that and I just don't know it yet, and I'm across an ocean. Goodness. The sheer power of that.

1

u/poppinwheelies Aug 26 '26

BBC is reporting “at least 31 people dead”. Um 31,000 seems more likely. 😔

49

u/Internal_Concert_217 Aug 26 '26

I don't think even one person is alive from those scenes. Such a devastating thing to happen.

1

u/Cosmichydra_56 Aug 27 '26

No one survived there, thousands of people have lost their dear lives

-6

u/PocketPanache Aug 26 '26

I know it's cold, but whenever I see another flood or natural disaster that could have been avoided, like hurricanes and flooding, all I can do is shrug. As someone who designs cities, we know where to not build but it's the general public that says we're limiting freedom etc. Then, we politicized technical professions, diluting their ability to guide and implement best practices, i.e. not building in flood prone areas, and then people blame the government for "letting it happen". I guess it's easier to just blame others. This video is on a whole other level, though! I wonder if the odds were so low that it was never a concern.

7

u/No-Description2794 Aug 26 '26

I get you point. Learned from my granfather to never live or build something by a place that might suffer a landslide or a flood. For the wind, though, is a bit different.
For earthquakes, fires and volcanos, just don't live where they happen. The world is big, and there is plenty of areas that don't have those risks. That's why i live where i live.

Anyways, many of those people might not have decided to live there or be there.
they have been passing, working, drivind through it. So, all of this doesn't means you're safe.

And for designing cities? There are settlements made by not so smart people, hundreds of years ago. You can't just say "lets move all the villages and cities away.

3

u/Mnm0602 Aug 26 '26

Not everyone has the freedom of movement to live in places that don’t have these issues. They’re either economically or politically locked into a subset of all possible places. In China you’re even basically locked into your province internally depending on what you’ve got going for you in life. Social benefits are tied to where you’re born. There’s been some updated recently but tbd as to how much it improves things.

1

u/PocketPanache Aug 26 '26

Not sure why I'm crying down voted. We are saying the same?! We could stop expansion into those risky areas, but we don't. Most engineers will tell you they would never buy a home in a levee zone, for example. If the technical professional is indicating the insanity of an idea, I'm personally inclined to listen to that instead of a city figure saying growth is good and the flood plane is ripe for development. If you try to restrict it, public backlash claims freedom infringement. All I'm saying is it's crazy we perpetuate this kind of thinking when we could simply change our practices today so in 100 years the impacts are greatly reduced. Idk if reddit is assuming I'm suggesting we start moving the whole state of Florida or something lol. It's just interesting to me where we decide to draw the line of knowingly putting lives at risk. Even if it's not life and death, a flood can financially set a family back an entire generation. We humans don't really look at timeline outside out of lifetimes; it's difficult to ponder beyond your known and lived experience. We could reduce these very well known issues but our public policy says, at the behest of voters, it's fine. City planning is contemplative and weird like that!

7

u/CycloneIce31 Aug 27 '26

It was actually most likely the glacier falls which triggered this. The seismic activity they recorded was the massive glacier falling 4,000 feet. 

23

u/awkgem Aug 26 '26

Jesus. I thought a dam or levy must have broken because that was an enormous wall of water. Utter tragedy. It might sound insensitive but seeing them run made them look like ants trying to outrun a stream. A reminder of how fragile we are in the grand scheme of things.

1

u/Mysterious-Snow496 Aug 26 '26

I thought that was referred to as a tsunami?

1

u/finchdude Aug 27 '26

Apparently the glacial landslide itself caused the earthquake.

0

u/bluehoag Aug 27 '26

This is incorrect.

0

u/bluegreenred_yellow Aug 30 '26

The avalanche caused the EQ, not the other way around.

45

u/Remote_Section2313 Aug 26 '26

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2zyerv2lmo
https://english.nepalnews.com/s/climate/avalanche-induced-dam-burst-suspected-behind-devastating-rasuwa-floods/

An earthquake triggered an avalanche that dropped ice into a river (bbc) and that made a dam collapse (nepalnews). We will have to wait to be 100% sure.

57

u/AugustOfChaos Aug 26 '26

An earthquake actually did not occur. The landslide was so large it produced seismic waves akin to an earthquake.

Per USGS: “This event was initially reported as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Additional analysis of long period seismic waves indicate that the seismic energy was instead generated by a landslide.”

-1

u/NotYourAverageDaddy Aug 28 '26

Global warming is what happened. These kinds of terrible events will increase unfortunately

0

u/whatsagoinon1 Aug 28 '26

No erosion and landslides happened. Very common in that part of the world. Don't be ignorant.