Nepal’s urban poor weigh the cost of ‘nightmare’ floods

KATHMANDU: When floodwaters submerged large parts of Nepal’s capital, Indra Prasad Timilsina was able to save the three cows that feed his family – but everything else was washed away by the river.
The slum he lives in in Kathmandu is one of many neighborhoods devastated by torrential weekend rains that disproportionately hit the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.
The Bagmati River and its tributaries that crisscross the Kathmandu Valley, broke their banks in the pouring rain, hitting flimsy wood and tin shacks that shelter thousands of people along their shores.
“It’s like a nightmare. I have never seen such extreme flooding in my life,” the 65-year-old man told AFP.
“Everything is gone,” he added. “If you are dead, you don’t have to worry about anything. But if you survive, you have to face these problems. »
Timilsina earns a modest living by the river in Tripureshwor by selling milk from her cows, particularly to her neighbors, many of whom have left poor villages in the Nepalese countryside to survive in precarious situations on the fringes of the city.
He and his wife fled their home shortly after midnight Saturday as the river flowed at their feet — enough time to drive the cattle to higher ground, but not to gather the rest of their meager possessions.
The couple returned to what remained of their homes alongside hundreds of other people cleaning mud-covered walls, scooping buckets of water from the floor and retrieving bags of food that had not spoiled.
Timilsina said the waters had spoiled the nine bags of animal feed he had stocked up for his cows.
“We can survive,” he said, “but if I don’t feed them quickly, they will die.”
– “Destroyed by rising waters” –
Nearly 200 people in the capital and elsewhere in Nepal were killed in weekend flooding, and nearly three dozen others remain missing.
Army search and rescue Crews have transported more than 4,000 people to safety and rescue teams are working frantically to clear highways around the capital blocked by landslide debris.
Entire neighborhoods around Kathmandu were flooded, damaging schools and medical clinics, many serving the city of nearly a million poorest residents.
Not far from Timilsina’s home, more than two dozen computers at a community school were destroyed by rising waters.
“They are of no use now,” teacher Shyam Bihari Mishra told AFP. “Our students will be deprived of education. »
Fatal rain-related floods and landslides are common across South Asia during the monsoon season, between June and September.
Consultants say climate change increases their frequency and severity.
Parts of Kathmandu received about 240 millimeters of rain in the 24 hours before Saturday morning, the heaviest rain in more than two decades.
Even without documented rainfall, monsoon flooding is a daily reality for the estimated 29,000 squatters among Kathmandu’s residents. urban poorwho build on the banks of rivers for lack of affordable shelter elsewhere.
“This year alone, we have run on our roof several times,” Bishnu Maya Shrestha, 62, told AFP.
“But we didn’t expect this time that the floods would get bigger and swallow up all our houses. »