The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood(economist.com) |
The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood(economist.com) |
CCTV footage is there. Horrific scene. When you see it coming at you it’s already too late.
Of course, this little preview is itself anthropogenic. This horrific disaster is the thinnest tendril of the monster we have unleashed.
As in, the dust/mud particles sprayed & floating in the air do not have the force to do harm beyond vision or breathing impairment, similar to the dust from a collapsing building, or the lead shockwave of a nuclear bomb detonation.
Of course, it looks terrible, and certainly somethingbut its not a reason to perish as long as you can stay away from the following water wall and mud current that does strike sometime after.
At the same time, I know this is real and a tragedy in an unimaginable scale. Every "little walking figure" is a full human being with dreams, fears and a rich life story.
I'm afraid that at one point it will just hit me super hard.
As an experiment, I showed the same video to my 85-year old grandmother, and she cried out in horror and prayed for the people in the video for a solid hour afterwards.
It's when you recognise the humanity of the individual - for example IR footage of a soldier trying to sleep in a foxhole before a drone drops a grenade. The aftermath starkly reminders you that this was a living person a few moments earlier.
In Japan we have had these sudden flood events this year, people just die as their cars are washed away.
Never in my life have I considered checking the weather forecast and flood watch warnings almost every time I get in the car but I do this year.
We have really fucked the climate and this is just the beginning.
edit: seems the only way to search the site is the google, this thread has few videos
How we die does matter. No one should be murdered. Many would prefer to die peacefully, in their sleep, unaware. Survivors generally prefer that the dead have died peacefully -- it can be disturbing to think about a loved one's painful and scary final moments.
The number that die naturally and daily is not scarier or more upsetting than the much smaller number that die violent deaths daily.
It makes me think a bit of the Johnstown flood from 1889:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood#/media/File:Th...
The valley where the floods occurred in Nepal has a V-shape, and the peaks around it have much more relief. It's much easier for a large landslide to fill the bottom, creating a dam that can burst, or just continue down the valley without wasting all its energy on a broad flat plain at the bottom. The upper valley immediately below the cliff face that toppled was also a glacial U-shaped valley though, so this speculation might need adjustment as more work is done.
It's worth emphasizing just how much less monitored and dangerous Nepal's mountains are though. The (greater) Himalayas are unlike any other mountain ranges I've ever seen.
https://earth.google.com/web/@28.34107217,85.43477356,2834.6...
Marmolada glacier collapse, Italian Dolomites (2022)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/05/within-five-mi...
https://www.politico.eu/article/climate-change-italy-canazei...
Village buried, Blatten, Switzerland (2025)
https://planetski.eu/2025/05/29/swiss-village-hit-by-landsli...
Evacuations after rockfall (2025)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/30/rockfalls-ital...
Evacuations, mudslides, bridge destroyed (2026 – last week)
https://italien.news/en/chronicle/severe-weather-hits-northe...
Village threatened, Kandersteg Switzerland (2026 – last week)
https://planetski.eu/2026/08/19/monitoring-continues-on-moun...
That of course means the old wisdom in which places to settle is safe no longer holds. However placed like Austria or Switzerland have top notch tech and public serviced, meaning glaciers are condtantly surveiled and such risks have a much bigger chance of getting noticed here than in the relatively poor Nepalese mountain region. But that doesn't mean black swan events are always preventable.
It really hits the most kind and humble people in Nepal as I know from the stories my grandparents (both avid alpinists) told me about being there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YisdT5AJobk
France is actively draining some of those glacier lakes to prevent them to build up over time.
There's the 1963 Vajont Dam collapse in northern Italy (just south of the Swiss border).
Nutshell summary: one of the tallest dams ever built (262m / 860ft) created a reservoir in a high valley surrounded by the sedimantary limestone slopes of Mounte Toc. Layers of limestone were separated by clay a few cm thick. As the reservoir filled, the clay was hydrated, effectively becoming a lubrication layer. On 9 October 1963 a 2km long landslide of roughly 260 million m^3 slammed at 110 kph into the reservoir creating a tsunami of 115 million m^3 of water which overtopped the dam itself in a 250m high wave. The primary impact was downstream in the Piave Valley utterly destroying several villages and towns, with 1,900--2,500 deaths. (Other waves washed across the reservoir and upstream causing additional damage.)
There's a detailed Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam>.
Also several good videos detailing the specifics of the disaster on YouTube.
Generally the Alps are at a far lesser scale than the Himalaya, but yes, glacier, flood, and landslide risks exist.
The length of time between the spray you mention, and the impact of the water wall, is single digit seconds. It doesn't make a difference.
The camera position is elevated at least 6--8 stories above the valley floor, an elevation of 20--24m or so by my estimate.
Slightly below it is a concrete platform supporting a parabolic dish antenna.
That platform is well above the main debris flow, catches only comparatively minor impacts, and ... is knocked flat just before the video terminates.
More significantly, the three story block structure at the lower left of the frame is seen visibly displaced an instant before it is obscured by the debris flow, at about 30s into the video.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mudslide_at_Gyirong_Port_...>
We now have before/after images of the precise location of the port. THere is absolutely no indicate that structures ever existed there:
<https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-08-28/3D-imagery-reveals-pat...>
From: "How do newly released 3D images explain the Gyirong mudslide?" <https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-08-28/3D-imagery-reveals-pat...>.
There is no conceivable way that this can be perceived as a minor or generally-survivable incident.
It's much worse than you seem to think based on the videos.
Maybe some moderately increased risk of extreme rainfall causing localised flooding, mudslides etc, but Bogotá in particular has an incredibly mild climate year round, and you're at 2600m so you aren't too worried about sea level risk.
As far as I'm aware basically no risk from hurricanes, tornados or anything like that. Biggest risk is earthquakes which is nothing to do with climate change and can be mitigated.
In fact Bogotá is a bit chilly so might be nice if it was slightly warmer.
For some reason people assume that climate change means you need to move closer to the poles, but moving to higher elevation is much better
The average value of homes in safe parts of Canada has risen significantly. E.g. Vancouver is devastatingly expensive, while nearby Abbotsford and Richmond are floodplains and reclaimed marsh, respectively, and are cheap. Sometimes uninsurable, but cheap.
The market will price us all out of the safest places and indeed arguably already has. Expect housing values to continue to diverge. A dry hovel is superior to the mightiest of flooded manses, but a home in a dry, safe metropolis, with enough water for all?
Literally invaluable. It will be priced accordingly.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5137024/climate-haven-h...
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/mt-rainier-lahar-hazard-ma...
The implicit HN Forbidden Topics List is beginning to look a lot like an impartial description of a Tuesday.
This is the same adage used by the Governments with the "think about the children" campaigns, its a distraction. A cop out.
This glacier probably melted many times in the past, especially in such a sudden and violent manner.
I'm sure this is in no way anomalous, nor is it something that could predictably result at some point from a warming planet.
That doesn’t diminish the tragedy in any way, this event was shocking and brutal. But it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.
(For the detection-impaired.)
Still plenty of room to debate numbers.
Watching the video makes you realize how small you are in front of the nature. It feels painful to even watch it but its an eyeopener at the same time. Its a misconception to think that the climate would always remain same, nature is an constantly moving/changing entity. What might be perceived as destruction is also the mechanism how creation of life or life like conditions happened in the first place. Just makes me feel like appreciating the day even more.
The blast flattened 230 sq mi of forest in minutes.
540 million tons of ash fell in 9 hours, affecting 22,000 sq mi.
The mudflow (lahar) was this debris mixing with 170 million cubic yards of glacial ice and snow, moving at 80 mph.
People liked to make smart ass comments about people who took photos "and would soon be dead" - "they were miles away, they could have left". For a lot of them? No.
The sheer magnitude of these events is truly unimaginable, even if you "were there" (nearby).
And MSH was barely a 5 on the VEI 0-8 (roughly) logarithmic scale, though you can't map to death toll easily.
Pinatubo in 1991 was a high 6. Krakatoa too. Tambora is the largest we know, in 1815, VEI 7, and is estimated at eighty times more output than MSH, and triggered the "Year Without a Summer" globally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer) that pulled down average -global- temperatures by a full degree over the course of a year. It completely disrupted the monsoon season throughout Asia, leading to flash flooding events like this becoming a very regular occurrence.
I think some of these types of stats are the closest terrestrial things we have at the limits of human comprehensibility (probably only eclipsed by "interstellar distances").
Truman refused to leave Mt. St. Helens. There is a memorial cross today whereabouts his lodge stood.
It turns out that improved forecasting, warning systems, and well-established emergency response, rescue, and recovery systems, can all tamp down risk.
Looking at your article, the subhead reveals a split narrative: "Natural disasters may cost more money, but they claim far fewer lives than in decades past."
What's begun to occur with wildfires is that events are now exceeding the capability of even advanced modern technological societies to address them. Wildfires now regularly enter the urban core, not merely the urban fringe. That's something unheard of in the US from roughly the 1920s, and there wasn't a notable large-scale urban fire until the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991. Even that was arguably at the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Contrast the Tea Fire (2008, Montecito & Santa Barbara, CA), the Tubbs Fire (2017, Santa Rosa and Sonoma, CA), Camp Fire (2018, Paradise, CA), Carr Fire (2018, Redding, CA), the August 2020 California lightning fires (2020, multiple locations, 3,500+ structures destroyed), the Marshall fire (2021, Marshall, Superior, and Louisvill, CO), the Mountain Fire (2024, Ventura, CA), the Hawaii wildfires (2023, Lahaina, HI), the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires (2025, Pasadena and Altadena CA amongst other locations), and the 2026 Spokane complex (2025, Spokane, WA, ~850 structures).
That's just within the US (an advanced modern technological society), omits wildfires not significantly impacting urban regions, and probably skips a few. There've also been unprecedented urban fires in Canada, Europe, and Australia within the past few decades after nearly a century of no such instances.
(Europe is an exception: for some reason there were numerous urban conflagrations in the period 1939--1945, e.g., Dresden and Hamburg, though climate doesn't seem directly implicated as I recall. Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other Japanese cities had a similar experience at the time.)
As more facts come out about the Nepal-Tibet glacial flood event of 2026, it's pretty clear that many casualties and damage were unavoidable at all once the event itself was triggered. Avoiding casualties would have required extensive evacuations of a nearly 100km stretch of the Trishuli River, possibly for weeks, with an affected population of over 1 million souls.
I've addressed this in a few recent HN comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473419> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473201> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460081>
Plus its malaric jungle, so mosquitos can kill you day(dengue ones) and night.
Thats not a definition of move to a better place by any means, unless you come from say Bangladesh.
As a practical matter the effects are pretty similar. Rainier has had lahars and jökulhlaups in the past.
I believe Lahars are specifically volcanic, this would be better described as a combination flood and landslide at the same time.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c6y8mjmnpxv0t?post=asset%3Ac6b...
I have no clue what point you’re trying to make, but I don’t think you got it across here.
In terms of death toll, a power outage during a severe deep freeze (with subzero temperatures and -50 wind chills) or a wet bulb event has a far greater lethality potential than wildfires. The most deadly wildfire in California history was the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise; it caused 85 deaths. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1989, immortalized in SimCity and several made-for-TV movies, only caused 25 deaths. By contrast, the 1995 Chicago heat wave caused 740 fatalities, and even the 2024 polar vortex event that barely made headlines killed more people (90) than the Camp Fire.
(Also note the low absolute numbers of even very severe, headline-grabbing natural disasters in developed countries. And that good construction can mitigate almost all of them. You are probably better off, in strict actuarial terms, by settling in a place where you can make a lot of money and then using it to prepare your home for disaster than by settling in a place that is cheaper but where you can't afford the latest building technology.)
I live in Montreal, but sometimes I see bitter weathers in Toronto during the winter. Ofc we have our share of pain, but I'm fine with snow -- raining is a huge problem in recent years -- I'm installing a French Drain right now, and hopefully it offers enough protection. However, my house is sitting on top of clay, so that could be a big issue.
Somewhat more concerning is that tornado frequency is increasing at a ferocious rate, though most are relatively minor (EF-0 / EF-1).
The total for 2026 to date is 207 ground tracks (as of 27 Aug 2026). The previous full year record was 142, and the historical average (again full-year) is closer to 50.
This has knock-on effects to insurance as well as raising home and landscaping repair (downed trees, etc.).
<https://chicago.suntimes.com/environment/2026/08/27/200-torn...>
Flash-flooding is also an increasing concern, though unlike Nepal, water channels tend to be largely flat. Urban creeks, local rivers, retention ponds, and low-lying locations (underpasses, local low spots) may experience flooding, though generally flow strength is low. Basement flooding is the most likely risk.
Given it took FEMA ten days to get power restored to the super dome, how long will responses be when there are many simultaneous disasters of that size or bigger? With the current admin the answer could be “indefinite”
Excess rainfall creates an explosion of brush that during the now annual drought turns to tinder.
Eventually only desert remains viable, and everything above it, including arability, is locked away forever.
