Deadly floods and landslides are common across South Asia during the monsoon season from June to September, but experts say climate change is making them worse.
Kavre, Nepal:
Survivors of the monsoon floods that ravaged Nepal at the weekend criticized the government on Tuesday for inadequate relief efforts during a disaster that killed at least 225 people.
Deadly floods and landslides are common across South Asia during the monsoon season from June to September, but experts say climate change is worsening them.
At the weekend, whole neighborhoods in the capital, Kathmandu, were inundated, along with villages in remote pockets of the Himalayan country that were still awaiting relief efforts.
“There is no road, so nobody has come,” Mira KC, who lives in a village in Kavre district to Kathmandu’s east, told AFP.
“Even if they do, those who died are dead already, and the damage is done. All they will do is offer condolences; what will they do?”
The floods have disproportionately affected Kathmandu’s poorest residents, who live in haphazard slums along the banks of the Bagmati River and its tributaries, which snake through the city.
Slum resident Man Kumar Rana Magar, 49, recounted to AFP: “The authorities sheltered us at a school when our homes got inundated after their homes were flooded.
He said, however, that they had been compelled to leave before they were ready for their homes upon the school’s reopening for classes.
“We are so close to the seat of the government. If they cannot care for the poor this close, what will they do about others?” he said.
According to the police, at least 225 people have lost their lives due to these floods, and another 24 are reported missing, while more than 4,000 others were rescued.
Nepal’s weather bureau stated that preliminary data showed that 240 millimeters of rain fell in the 24 hours leading to Saturday morning- the most significant single-day downpour in over two decades.
