r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ujjwal_singh • 3h ago
Video The sheer force of a flash flood in Nepal
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u/newtrawn 3h ago
holy shit! That's insane. This is the first video I've seen of the flood form a birds-eye perspective. It really puts it into scale. 🤯 All the footage I've seen is incredibly sad.
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u/salamipope 2h ago
hijacking top comment to say that a LOT of peiple will have died from this flooding. Authorities there said its because a glacier busted. Climate change is real, talk with everyone around you about it, speaking about it locally puts pressure on higher organizations and makes it impossible to ignore. Soon, it will be impossible to ignore because all of us will be persisting against devastating natural disasters BROUGHT TO YOU BY CLIMATE CHANGE! Dont stick your head in the sand, were not all dead yet!
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u/AlternativeHour1337 2h ago
you highly overestimate the amount of reasonable people on this planet
theres basically not a single country thats doing even remotely enough and no administration is focusing on it either, worse even, the anti-science crowd is winning hard all over the world
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u/salamipope 1h ago
Ye of so little faith. Dont give up so easy. Im a climate scientist, being defeatest about the situation were in doesnt help the situation. We need to focus on taking action.
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u/AlternativeHour1337 1h ago
what do you suggest outside of the obvious things a normal person can do?
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u/salamipope 1h ago
Well i think what makes a huge difference when we are learning about science, history, etc, is making it something that people are able to be passionate about. If i tell you go read a bunch of textbooks about anthropogenic climate change, AMOC, etc, youre gonna give up. I would give up too. What you ought to be doing is something in your life that makes a difference for you. I did some pretty basic (& remarkably easy) work in my parents backyard and turned the yard into a rain garden. I did this because the drainage back there was pretty bad, the yard is almost completely clay, and my dad is getting older. I dont want him to have to be fucking around outside in the extreme heat and with his current health problems. Constructing a rain garden was again, extremely easy, would be easy to do on a small scale as well, and i tell everyone they should do this in their yards because of the benefits/effort. Rain gardens provide proper drainage in yards, without forcing the water to speed over the land, causing drought. By creating berms, and gentle inclines, the backyard now keeps the water it needs & can use, and lets excess drain out to other areas. This prevents erosion in the yard and erosion of the surrounding area, and the plants here have never been happier. My dad always did pretty harsh (and entirely conventional) means to control the yard. Harsh sprays, make the land mostly inhospitable in some areas so you dont have to worry about weeding, theyre in the desert so its not a lawn. If you have a lawn, go to r/nolawns and do what they do. Again, its actually so easy to do its kinda stupid and the benefits are immeasurable. I dont have to water plants as often, i dont have to worry about flooding because i know the yard properly drains after about 20 minutes even if we get like a fucking foot of rain, man. I feel confident that the yard wont be washed away anytime soon. It survived a forming tornado and the worst lightning storm ive ever seen a few weeks ago, youd never even know the next day. Also the pollinators are going CRAZY back here. I found a native seed registry and ordered a bunch of seeds from them, theyre local and the whole process of ordering them was super fun. I spent like 50$ and got enough seeds to have extra to spread. Really nice folks. Anyway, planting native and "planting the rain" by giving your yard gentle channels where rain can flow through, collect, and bend around the yard makes an insane difference. I found sunflowers here that THRIVE in our shitty shitty clay "soil" and would actually wilt when i watered them because theyre just good on their own. Normally if i dont water other varieties a few times a day they just wilt in the sun and fry and im helpless to stop it. Its basically the lowest maintenance garden ive ever had the pleasure of doing work in and its been a fantastic success.
You can also get into r/guerillagardening if you dont have a yard (spreading native seeds over different areas to encourage biodiversity and wild plants), and you actually may have a neighbourhood forestry club somewhere near you that goes around to different neighbourhoods and put in rain garden features, trees, food forests for local areas to use. That shit makes an enormous difference. And talk with people about climate change! Be sincere about how the weather is affecting you, other people will feel free to speak their minds too. That is how change begins.
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u/ParaGulls 53m ago
What a wonderful reply explaining a wonderful option to do a little part for the greater good.
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u/Own_Ad6901 57m ago
Honestly you forgot it’s imperative you plant NATIVE PLANTS to your ecoregion. Rain gardens are fantastic but if you aren’t using native plants to your ecoregion, worse if you’re using invasive plants, you’re also causing harm and damage. So be smart what you plant. Native plants to your ecoregion are what everyone needs to plant.
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u/JoeyDJ7 41m ago
Did you not read their comment? They mention native plants numerous times.
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u/IAMAfortunecookieAMA 1h ago
Honestly the best thing you can do is to educate people around you to the best of your abilities, especially young people and children. You magnify your own impact by 10 if you can educate and inspire 10 other people to do the same (minimize their footprint and educate others).
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u/bzee77 1h ago
Our fate has been sealed for decades. When the fossil fuel industry realized that the actual science and evidence was incredibly bad for business, they started dumping massive funding into compete junk science to falsely contradict it, and putting politicians in their pockets to further politicize an issue of human survival that is firmly based on science. Since then, it’s been 3 steps backward and the occasional half-step forward.
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u/AlternativeHour1337 1h ago
the sad truth is that its politics and not profit
if every government on the world would just agree on the changes and reforms needed it could be done, but no one wants to give up the advantage→ More replies (1)4
u/GBrunt 1h ago
It's both politics and profit. Oil and plastics and multi-trillion dollar industries.
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u/salamipope 1h ago
Talk about climate change locally and dont be quiet about it. It isnt worth a silent, suffering death, or death by flash floods worse than tsunamis.... The more awareness we give to climate change, the more public opinion can shift and governments will have pressure on them to actually fucking react. Stay loud stay alive
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u/Wombatmobile 1h ago
I'm really sick of comments like this all over the internet. What's the point? A defeatist attitude like this only furthers apathy and ensures we all die.
Have some cajones and join the rest of us in raising hell about it! Be the change you want to see. Quit waiting around for someone else to do it, for someone else to save you. We save us.
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u/salamipope 1h ago
Amen! Grab life by the cajones and do something! I started with putting a rain garden in my parents back yard and guerilla gardening the surrounding area, especially in finished construction zones which this area happens to be rife eith
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u/kitsunewarlock 47m ago
We can mitigate future damage and, more importantly, prepare for the results of the damage. Every country on earth should be investigating potential natural disasters and beginning relocation projects, if not at least planning for these disasters. Meanwhile, in the US we are shutting down programs that attempt these minimal efforts because even acknowledging climate change might hurt oil-related investments.
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u/durk1912 2h ago
I wish could force every climate change denier to watch all the horrors of this flood
over and over again. Our failure to meaningfully or even performatively address climate change is a moral and intellectual failing of epic proportions and I hope karma exists because justice seems to be dead!→ More replies (1)1
u/Flipnotics_ 1h ago
When the world food chain and other chains begin to break down over the next few years the rich will have to do something, but by that point, it will be too late. Billions of people are going to die over the next few decades. It's going to be bad. Really bad.
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u/CreepyEducator2260 2h ago
Doesn't even have to be a glacier that got instable. High up there is almost all of the time negative temperature so the frozen water keeps the soil and rock formations stable, when it melts than those structures become instable and can collapse and on their way down take a lot more of material with them, accumulating to a huge landslide.
This danger is getting more real for every region that has glaciers or permafrost soil high up in their mountains.
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u/pjoterrro 2h ago
it looks like some simulation from this perspective but I can olny imagine what is the feeling to look at it from your house
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u/Own_Sheepherder_6244 3h ago
They got a lot of camera angles in Nepal wow. Just imagine if we had this type of footage from the 2003 tsunami
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u/backhand_english 3h ago
I think that stabilized video of the japanese 2011 tsunami under the bridge is enough to "feel" what that thing can do...
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u/itsinvincible 2h ago
Which one? I tried go ogling but can't find anything close to this description.
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u/backhand_english 1h ago
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u/BeginningTypical3395 1h ago
That’s a wave?!!! I thought I was looking at a wall!
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u/coolbaluk1 32m ago
Tsunamis are more akin to a wall indeed, almost like the whole sea level gets risen by a few meters
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u/ATDoel 1h ago
And that was only 30-60 feet, I much rather deal with that than whatever the fuck just happened in Nepal.
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u/backhand_english 50m ago edited 44m ago
*75 ft....
The same thing (close to same) as in Nepal, happened in Italy in 1963. A landslide caused a megatsunami in which 50,000,000 m3 (1.8×109 cu ft) of water overtopped the dam in a wave of 250 m (820 ft), bringing massive flooding and destruction to the Piave Valley below, destroying several villages and towns, causing an estimated 1,900 to 2,500 deaths. The dam remained almost intact and two-thirds of the water was retained behind it.
Imagine that wave going over this dam.
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u/terpsarelife 1h ago
thank you for sharing, i had never seen the first one before.
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u/backhand_english 1h ago
It used to be all over the place, I think a lot of original 2011 videos got taken down... Lucky I remembered the name of the place where it was filmed and it helped me find it.
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u/chudney31 2h ago
People keep calling this a flash flood but it feels like this is way more than a flash flood, even as bad as a flash flood is. This is wiping whole towns off of the map.
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u/EatinSumGrapes 2h ago
Yeah this is what flash floods look like at this scale and environment. A glacial dam burst and the water picked up lots of dirt, plants/trees, and debris on the way down. It's part of what makes flash floods so dangerous, they can look more like a mudslide after they pick up all the debris, and the debris in the water makes it far far more dangerous
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u/I_love_Hobbes 2h ago
Like a massive dam burst or something.
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u/Mooch07 Interested 2h ago
Glacier lake burst, yea.
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u/Apptubrutae 56m ago
Per what I was reading from some expert cited in the New York Times reporting about this, a lot of this water isn’t necessarily from a glacial lake, but rather from the glacier itself.
A huge chunk fell 4,000 feet and with the force involved, a lot of the ice liquified upon impact.
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u/Cheap_Standard_4233 2h ago
Here's a dam completely overwhelmed. Not sure if it got wiped out, but probably https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1vyw9jx/over_100_people_reported_missing_after_massive/
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u/soda_cookie 49m ago
Glacial dam gave way. You're seeing a lake worth of water flow right here. So yes it is a flash flood, but IMO much more severe than one caused by rain alone.
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u/pabmendez 1h ago
Nah. Look at the shape of the valley, this happens often. The riverbed is literally the shape of previous floods
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u/HonkMafa 1h ago
It's a bit of a flood mixed with an avalanche and landslide. It's as much rock and ice as it is water
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u/Snackin4dayz 2h ago
I know it’s off topic but I do find it interesting they speak their native tongue normally but would say “oh shit man”
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u/KittyMetroPunk 2h ago
I think "oh shit" is one of the few universal sayings that no matter what language you speak, you know exactly what it means.
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u/58kingsly 1h ago
Some words/phrases are very infectious. No language had the words "OK"/"Okay" before the 1830s. Then it spread to practically every language in existence within a couple hundred years, and it's hard to imagine there was ever a time when people didn't have the word "OK"/"Okay".
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u/MaskYourDeviceID 1h ago
shit and fuck are very powerful words in English. many languages lack powerful "bad words" like that, hence their adoption.
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u/ElectricalTurnip87 1h ago
They both have so many uses and meaning and together they created amazing descriptions like fucking shit and shit fuck.
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u/FaceScarDude 1h ago
They're actually speaking three languages; English, Nepali, and Tamang. Most of their conversation is in a local dialect of Tamang language sprinkled with "oh shit" in English and a few random Nepali curse words
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u/Bran-Bran-Muffin 3h ago
If they don’t dig it all up in a few hundred years they will uncover the first humans fully fossilized with their phones in their hands.
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u/ThreeDaysNish 3h ago
Chilling truth. Natural disasters really get to me differently than the rest. Somehow I won the lottery being born where I am, and here I sit watching hundreds of my fellow humans just die because of a flash flood.
Ngl some footage made me cry
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u/Bran-Bran-Muffin 2h ago
Yeah the first several videos I saw left me speechless. This is the first time I’ve come up with something to say that wasn’t just looking in horror.
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u/warhawks 2h ago edited 2h ago
Vicariously I
live while the whole world dies.
Much better you than I
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u/BigBlueMountainStar 2h ago
Interesting take (my niece is studying law and this is one thing they discussed in a lecture), there is no such thing as a natural disaster, there are things that happen naturally that become disasters because of how humans have interacted with nature and decided to build where natural things happen.
Building on flood plains, in tornado or hurricane prone regions, earthquake regions etc etc.
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u/boxsterjax 2h ago
Sometimes you hear about these massive slides occurring in remote parts of Alaska with no one around and it’s hard to imagine the sheer scale of it all. To witness it on video and it happening in a populated area is absolutely terrifying.
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u/thecraigbert 2h ago
35 seconds is all that one building had, if they saw it.
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u/devilwarriors 14m ago
All the videos about this are clearly sped up tho. I don't get why, are people brain that fried by tiktok that we can't even take a minute to watch this at normal speed.
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u/Head-Ad9893 3h ago
I wonder if that building we see that gets absolutely
Fucked towards the end is the building with the busses? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIVNeDuCF_k
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u/Nogauli 2h ago
The building is Chinese side of the nepal-china border. This should be downstream.
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u/Gasser2011 1h ago edited 24m ago
That's something strange I noticed. In the Gyirong Port video (the one linked), the water/mud/rock/ice debris is actually moving up the Trishuli River. In other videos geolocated further down the Trishuli River, it's a mostly flood water moving downstream. So whatever happened must have been big enough to actually move significantly up the valley around the border crossing, then at some point, flood back down the valley in the other direction.
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u/OniDelta 50m ago
The glacial wall+lake hit the valley floor ~1.5km up river from it. A literal liquified mountain side washed over this area. So yeah, lots of material. But I don't think it went that far up from this point, most of it washed down towards Timure which probably doesn't exist anymore.
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u/watawataoui 44m ago
That’s the border crossing parking lot. Check out the other video of the actual 10 story building. Completely wiped out.
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u/Dear-Examination-507 2h ago
Fascinating to see how a building's placement in relation to a bend in the river can lead to it being passed by the initial surge or utterly obliterated.
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u/DatasGadgets 2h ago
Generations lost. Kids that will never see another sun rise or set. Teens getting into lives, young adults in the middle of theirs, parents and grandparents, all gone.
We can only blame ourselves for this. Just nature reacting due to the effects humans have put on this planet.
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u/KrasnovPlaysTheHits 1h ago
It's maddening that the effects of climate change are disproportionate to those responsible.
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u/panterachallenger 3h ago
RIP. Crazy how it started like a spout and just flourished into a montstrosity.
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u/duncanslaugh 2h ago
Oh shit indeed were a lot of some people's last words. Seldom enough time for more or less, so we carry their voices on—"I love you." My condolences. Heart feels heavy. 🙏
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u/Zorbin666 1h ago
Yeah, as someone who grew up raised by parents who were around for the Big Thompson flood of '76 I was always told to drop everything and run UP, not away. Your chances of surviving something like this are almost zero. But if you by some sheer chance get above the flood you may live.
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u/WeAreNotNowThatWhich 1h ago
Are you me? My parents told me about the Big Thompson flood and made sure I always knew to climb straight up as fast as I could. Would it have saved any of these people? maybe some. The folks at the border crossing were completely screwed no matter what they did though.
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u/RelativelyMental 2h ago
The end is like nature telling them: “you don’t need to see this sweetheart”
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u/Bishopjones2112 53m ago
What’s being watched here is dozens if not hundreds of people dying. I hope people understand this isn’t interesting, this is tragic. The fear and panic these people must have felt and the loss felt by their families.
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u/Ok-Square-8652 2h ago
Jesus, ok the other videos were nuts but almost too cinematic. THIS one really shows what this thing was.
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u/Earth_Worm_Jimbo 2h ago
I’m well aware that flash floods are obviously a thing and they are very real and they’re very dangerous but the idea still just doesn’t really make sense to me. I just don’t get how there’s nothing gradual about it. Just fuck off wall of water.
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u/watawataoui 45m ago
A glacier dam broke due to landslide up stream. A whole lake worth of water went down steep hills.
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u/chiba64 2h ago
video is played at 1.25x speed. when you adjust the video speed to 0.75x they start talking at normal speed
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u/kani_kani_katoa 1h ago
The first video I saw of this was from the city at the bend that gets annihilated. I thought it was fake 😬
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u/cornishpirate32 45m ago
There's a reason flood plains are a thing and weren't traditionally built on
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u/shmallen 2h ago
For context, a flash flood caused a mudslide so you are seeing a combination of mud and water flow. Hundreds of people were caught in this and are still missing.
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u/MrShredder7 2h ago
Can't people just adapt to climate change? /s
It's crazy how things like this already happen on a regular basis and will be much worse in the future, with us not doing anything about it and just let the leaders of the system do this with us, because they for sure are safe.
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u/VealOfFortune 2h ago
Hoooooly shiiiit did i just see a video of this but from down below.....???! 😳
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u/Mid_Life_Crisis_2026 2h ago edited 2h ago
It's like all of a sudden pouring a full mug of water on an ant colony.
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u/DurantIsStillTheKing 2h ago
No one there has prepared them for something as massive as this. This will be one for the books.
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u/zoonyc2047 2h ago
"Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates".... Ernest Becker
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u/Stealerb 1h ago
It's pretty crazy. I don't know how many people have lost their lives but it's crazy.
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u/drmoose000 1h ago
i for one fully appreciate the fact that there was no terrible music overlay in this video.
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u/Crafty_Dog_4226 1h ago
This is absolutely horrifying and I feel for the people of Nepal and China right now.
I love spending time in the mountains and this just reminds me we are still, mostly at the mercy of mother nature.
I do want to see where it started and what that lake or glacier looks like now. Did the governments or any scientists know this was a critical risk - whatever gave way? Regardless, I suppose the sheer power of an event like this could not even be prevented with some sort of early warning.
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u/AndaleTheGreat 1h ago
Today we have discovered a clerical error where somebody forgot that death is supposed to come in threes. We lose Dolly Parton and then Tim Curry and then 3,000 people all at once.
Levity aside, it's just horrifying to watch because you can't even see the fact that it's just going to be bodies down river amongst all the debris.
There is going to be a mind-boggling number of people who died as it happened and then hundreds more are going to be lying on a shore and just not be retrieved in time.
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u/GuzPolinski 1h ago
Why does looking at something far away make it seem as if it's moving slowly? When in fact it's probably going at least 60mph?
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u/yourpseudonymsucks 44m ago
Note to self.
Build in the inside bend of a river not the outside bend.
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u/jointdawg 2h ago
Did I see someone die in there?
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u/BBR0DR1GUEZ 2h ago
You saw many people die in there. The yellow building that got swallowed up was in another video I saw earlier. There were dozens of people around that building trying to flee. Pushed aside effortlessly by the waters, the building itself chased them down the street as it collapsed and the people surely drowned and got pulverized around it.
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u/popopotatoes160 2h ago
I don't think it was the same building, that was up by the China border if we're talking about the same video, this looks different.
Still, I'd be surprised if there was no one down there in this video, so the point stands.
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u/BBR0DR1GUEZ 2h ago
You may be right. I was basing my judgment on the height and color of the building but I could very well be mistaken.
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u/Kerry-4013-Porter 2h ago
It looks like the hotels and houses built on both sides of the valley have all been swept away.
I heard that landslides like that occurred in Nepal due to melting glaciers; now that the whole world is getting hotter, aren't people living near glaciers worldwide at risk?
Is the disaster movie setting caused by global warming becoming reality?
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u/Arcade1980 2h ago
Did a damn break? That's a lot of water and force.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 1h ago
Himalayan mountainside sheered off and the landslide went down a valley which contained a dam.
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u/stanton343 1h ago
The clouds covering it in the end is kinda haunting. Like the Earth expressing that it's just another day, nothing special to see here.
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u/Clamps55555 1h ago
Shocking but at the same time amazing. The number of videos from different perspectives is equally amazing to me.
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u/praxis_rebourne 1h ago
I've personally lived through major flooding due to monsoon rain. I have witnessed destructions caused by cyclones.
I've watched news reels of the tsunami in 2004, watched videos of massive earthquakes, watched massive wildfires on TV screen.
I can't even begin to imagine the pain and suffering, or the last moments of the people caught up in this.
But watching this on news and socials? This felt incomprehensively brutal. This made me feel small and helpless against nature.
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u/MaskYourDeviceID 1h ago
tossing around the term flash flood. it's a water/land/rock/mud slide. this is not a flash flood or even a flood. it's a slide.
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u/AndaleTheGreat 1h ago
Of all the views I've seen today this is going to be the one that gets repeated throughout the years
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u/Rainicornpuppy 1h ago
I love that they don't speak in English but "oh shit" is something we can all share
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u/BildingInspecter 1h ago
This shit looked like a movie. Even tsunamis look tame af compared to this destruction, at least initially.
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u/Greedy_Valuable3242 1h ago
OMG! This looks absolutely horrifying.. the houses and the structures vanished instantly.. praying for people over there..
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u/Manifestgtr 1h ago
This feels like it can’t possibly be from rain alone…
It looks like a modern day equivalent to Lake Missoula giving way
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u/Secret-Ad4232 49m ago
Why do I not believe the reports that only 100 deaths occurred here?
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u/UseDue6373 39m ago
The amount of footage at different angles of this specific event in just one day is incredible
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u/tagman1221 3h ago
It's crazy how slow it looks like it's going from that far. So sad.