Twenty-four-year-old Bibek Kumal was digging a toilet pit outside a newly built house on Wednesday in Bidur, downstream from the worst-hit Rasuwa district, near the border with Tibet. He suddenly heard a hissing sound, and four of his coworkers standing outside the pit started to shout at him to get out and run.
By the time he crawled out of the 5-foot-deep pit, they were already fleeing. He also started to sprint and was followed by a wall of water. It came crushing down like an earthquake. He was swept away downstream.
But “luckily I was stuck up in a mango tree”, he said. “Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death.”
He is now admitted to Kathmandu’s National Trauma Centre. He said that as he clung to the mango tree, houses where he had been working started to disappear. Police later rescued him; he suffered injuries to his right leg after being struck by water at first, then by stone.
In the bed next to him, 11-year-old Rihana Lamichhane narrowly escaped. She had suffered injuries to her leg and chest.
“I was at school. They closed the school because of this and asked us to go home,” she said. “As I was crossing the river, suddenly floodwater came gushing down.”
She expressed happiness for being alive, while she has no idea what happened to her friends. “I am happy nothing serious happened to my daughter,” said her mother Rita. “I am relieved to find her safe.”
The exact cause of the mudslide remains unclear. However, the most prominent theory is that the German Research Centre for Geosciences said that a 4.4-magnitude quake occurred about seven minutes before the mudslide, according to the time shown on the footage.
At least 359 people have died, and 667 are still missing.
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