Queens man recounts surviving Nepal flash flood; Long Islanders still missing

For Yogesh “Aadi” Dangol, a Queens Village resident who runs the popular Bishwa Sandesh news site for the Nepali American diaspora, a long-awaited trip to his birthplace last week turned into a nightmare.

Dangol, 48, returned to Nepal for the first time in seven years only to see his hometown all but wiped off the map on Wednesday morning, when a glacier and surrounding bedrock collapsed about 40 miles upriver, near the border with Tibet, about 14,000 feet higher in elevation. The ensuing tsunami-like flash flood tore through dozens of villages and towns, including Dangol’s, leaving at least 4,200 people missing and more than 900 confirmed dead in Nepal as of Monday, with more on the Chinese side.

"It was looking something like a movie, or like an AI thing,” Dangol told Newsday by video call from Kathmandu, the capital, Sunday. “It's [like] nothing that we can imagine.”

Newsday previously reported that two Long Islanders of Indian heritage who were visiting Nepal are among the missing. The families said they had not received any further news as of Monday evening.

Nepali Americans in the New York metropolitan area also lost loved ones, homes and land in the deluge.

Town washed away

Dangol, who was standing near a bridge, ran uphill when he heard people shouting and saw a haze appear to the north. By the time he reached high ground and turned around, most of Betrawati — a historic town of several thousand people where Nepal signed a peace treaty with China nearly 240 years ago — was gone. Multi-story concrete homes, offices and shops were washed away as the torrent surged.

Bikram Khattri, who runs a Nepali grocery store in Hicksville, said the mood in the community is somber.

“Business is slow — people feel sad, and they are donating their extra money to relief,” Khattri said in Nepali, adding that many are supporting the official Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund.

Tak Ruwali, a Levittown resident and past president of the Dhading Nepali Society America, an organization of expatriates from one of the flood-hit districts, said recovery will take a long time.

“Thousands of people need to be rehoused in a safe place. People lost their entire properties. Fertile farmland has been destroyed — it is going to be a huge challenge,” Ruwali said in Nepali.

The flood wiped out more than a dozen hydropower plants and destroyed one of the country’s two main highways to China. The Nepali government has yet to complete an overall damage assessment.

While scientists are still investigating the role of climate change in the glacier’s collapse, they have documented that the Himalayan region’s glaciers have lost over 12% of their area since 1990 due to melting.

Ruwali said he is concerned that not enough people — especially in the United States — believe in climate change.

“We need to learn lessons from this,” he said. “When I was a kid, all the mountains around us were white with snow — now you can see the black stone nine months of the year.”

Mass graves

The torrent swept some victims up to 100 miles downstream. The Nepali government has begun burying victims in mass graves, after struggling to keep the bodies refrigerated long enough for relatives to identify them — although it says it has collected DNA samples in each case.

Dangol survived the flood along with his son and parents, but he lost an aunt, an uncle and multiple other family members.

His home — distinctive because he’d built a clocktower atop the roof using remittances from New York — was one of the last left standing in Betrawati, though it was damaged beyond salvation, he said. Now, it sits stranded on a vast plain of silt left behind by receding water. No trace remains of dozens of his neighbors’ homes.

Dangol said Betrawati has endured disasters before — like a major earthquake that struck Nepal in 2015 — but no one expected the river to rise as it did.

“People have been living there since last 300 years,” he said. The Bhotekhosi River “was almost 10 minutes’ [walk] away from my home.”

Now, he is applying for new passports for his elderly parents, so they can return to New York. Along with so much else, the passports were swept away Wednesday.