Whangarei man fears for missing as Nepal floods devastate homeland

Prakash Khanal has lived in New Zealand for more than twenty years, but last Wednesday's flooding in Nepal pulled his attention back across the world with a force he couldn't resist. The water came suddenly, without warning, and when it arrived it carried away everything in its path. An estimated 57.4 million cubic metres of water tore through the region, and Khanal, who grew up in western Nepal, understood immediately what that volume meant: the search for survivors would grow harder with each passing day.

The flood destroyed the infrastructure that holds a region together. Bridges that connected one side of town to the other were gone. Roads that followed the river valleys were obliterated. People who needed to travel to Kathmandu, including Khanal's own brother, now faced long detours through winding routes just to move between places that were once minutes apart. The basic systems of daily life — water, gas, transport — became luxuries. "People lost everything," Khanal said. For those in villages and cities near the riverbanks, the isolation was nearly complete.

What made this flood different from other disasters Khanal had witnessed was its indiscriminate reach. He remembered the 2015 earthquake, a 7.8 magnitude event that devastated Kathmandu and the surrounding areas. That disaster had been terrible, and he had thought recovery might take thirty years. But earthquakes, he explained, left some houses standing while destroying others. A neighborhood could be partially spared. This flood was different. "In an earthquake some houses fell and the next door's house was okay. This time, no. Just everything." The water had swept across a narrow catchment but with such force that the damage felt more total, more complete than what the earthquake had wrought.

The human cost extended beyond the immediate loss. Bodies remained trapped in debris and sediment, many unidentifiable. In Nepali culture, burials and cremations are meant to happen quickly, a spiritual necessity for the deceased and their families. But without bodies, without identification, those rites could not proceed. Families were left waiting, unable to complete the rituals that mark the passage from life to death. Khanal worried too about the health consequences of bodies decomposing in the wreckage, about disease spreading through communities already fractured and struggling.

When Khanal spoke about the recovery ahead, his voice carried the weight of someone who had watched his country rebuild before. The immediate crisis — the search for survivors, the emergency response — would eventually fade from the news. But what came after would demand far more. "Building those roads, building those bridges, building that hydropower," he said. "That's when the country will need massive support from outside." Years of reconstruction lay ahead, not weeks. The infrastructure damage was so extensive that Nepal would need sustained international help to restore what the flood had taken.

Khanal felt the distance acutely. "I feel if you are away, you feel more," he said. So far, he had not received word that anyone in his immediate circle had been killed, but the uncertainty itself was a kind of weight. The hardship his country was enduring, the scale of what lay ahead — it was difficult to imagine from eight thousand miles away, and yet he could imagine it all too clearly.