Nepal flood survivors recount losing families in devastating disaster

Along the Nepal-Tibet border on a Wednesday in late August, a torrent of water and mud descended upon villages with a force so immense that instruments designed to measure the trembling of the earth could not distinguish it from a quake. At least 469 lives were confirmed lost by the following morning, with hundreds more unaccounted for — each absence a thread pulled from the fabric of a family, a livelihood, a future. In the hours that followed, survivors were left holding photographs and silent phones, standing at the edge of what had been their world, waiting for answers that the mud had not