STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Flooding in Nepal and Tibet has now killed at least 359 people that we know of and left far more than that missing, including 65 Americans. Those numbers come from the Nepali police, and the numbers keep rising.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The floods were triggered after a part of a glacier collapsed into a valley, blocking a river early Wednesday. That caused water to build up some 30 feet in 30 minutes. The water then tore through riverside communities for miles downstream, burying people in places under mud.
INSKEEP: NPR's Diaa Hadid covers Nepal and is on the line. Hi there, Diaa.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What are you hearing from people?
HADID: Well, we managed to get through to one survivor. Her name is Santa Tamang, and she's a 25-year-old university student who lives in one of the river valleys. And she spoke to the NPR producer Mamita Bhandari over the phone. And Mamita translated for her.
SANTA TAMANG: (Through interpreter) We were doing house chores. All of a sudden, police started the sirens of warning of the flood.
HADID: Tamang says people were shouting all around them. So her brother carried their elderly grandmother, and they rushed to higher ground. Their home was washed away. But Tamang says she's grateful to have just survived.
TAMANG: (Through interpreter) So many people lost their lives. Everything is gone, my childhood, my families, my community.
HADID: The thing is, Nepal is a popular tourist destination. And so the missing also include foreigners, including Americans. Many were Hindu pilgrims. One tour group of about 80 people lost contact after the flood swept away an immigration building. And here's one prominent spiritual leader. He's known as Sadhguru. And he's sharing the news with other worshippers. He posted the video on X.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SADHGURU: So...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Crying).
SADHGURU: ...This is a...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Crying) Oh, my God.
SADHGURU: ...Terrible and an extraordinary event, which, unfortunately, has turned out this way.
INSKEEP: Hard to get your brain around all of this. Are rescue efforts underway?
HADID: They are underway. But they're in their first stages. I spoke to Riaz Lodhi, who heads the World Food Programme there. And he says workers at this point are just trying to dig people out of the mud. But roads have been washed away, so the government's deploying helicopters.
RIAZ LODHI: This is all happening in the mountainous region, where road access is always challenging. But in the - under these circumstances, it's impossible.
HADID: Lodhi says they estimate about 10,000 households have been badly affected by this disaster. But he says that number will go up. At least, aid workers say, Nepali authorities have a well-practiced emergency response. They learned a lot from the 2015 earthquake. It was devastating, killed more than 9,000 people. But they also say no one's seen anything like these floods, how powerful they've been. But experts say it's going to keep on happening.
INSKEEP: Why would they keep happening?
HADID: It's happening because of climate change. I spoke to Mohammad Farooq Azam. He's from ICIMOD. It's an environmental advocacy group that covers Asia's high mountains - the Himalayas, Karakoram, Hindu Kush. And he says the Himalayas are just warming faster than the global average, and it's destabilizing some of the 60,000 glaciers up there, and that's triggering these avalanches. So he says communities in these areas urgently need more real-time data, but they don't have it.
MOHAMMAD FAROOQ AZAM: We don't have a lot of data from the region, so that we can develop some AI model to know the fragile areas or to know the areas where we are about to have such events.
HADID: He says, though, they'll have to get it done because this will keep on happening.
INSKEEP: NPR's Diaa Hadid covers South Asia. And she'll keep us updated. Diaa, thanks so much.
HADID: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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