The raging flood has passed, but horrific trauma remains - 경향신문

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At Durbar Square in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, on the 5th (local time), citizens commemorate victims who died or are missing due to the catastrophic flood. AP Yonhap News

The lethal torrent that began in Tibet on the 26th of last month swept through Shyabrubesi, Trishuli, and Betrawati in Nepal. Across the sand-covered riverbeds lay waterlogged, mud-caked bodies, and some were buried beneath rocks or swept downstream. Bridges were shattered, roads torn apart, and hydropower plants paralyzed. Homes collapsed, leaving behind millions of tons of debris.

But that is not all the river left. It left a toxic legacy of trauma and grief, broken livelihoods, threats to public health, and wounds of the heart that no excavator can scoop away. The torrent has passed. The horror has not ended. The real crisis now lies before us.

A cataclysmic surge of water, ice, mud, and rock, triggered by a high-mountain glacial disaster, roared down the Bhotekoshi River. After scouring villages, infrastructure, and the livelihoods of people, it surged into the Trishuli River basin and there danced a demonic, deadly dance. A week has passed, but the full scale of destruction is still being tallied. More than 1,000 have died, and thousands remain missing. It is estimated that about 2.2 million tons of debris are scattered across the ravaged areas.

We can, of course, count the dead, tally the debris, and calculate losses as if catastrophe were just another line in a ledger. But what the river leaves is not a spreadsheet. It leaves sorrow and trauma, livelihoods smashed to pieces, and a public health crisis that no accountant can neatly quantify. Perhaps this is the cruelest paradox: the hardest period may not yet have arrived.

The flood may recede on schedule; the crisis does not. Floods leave contaminated water, broken sanitation, damaged health facilities, severed supply chains for medicines, the injured, and displaced families packed into cramped shelters like chickens in a coop. These are perfect conditions for a second disaster, namely a public health crisis.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 10,000 households need immediate relief. Three health posts were completely destroyed, one hospital was partially damaged, and routes to two hospitals were cut off. WHO warns of growing risks of diarrheal and respiratory illnesses, unsafe food and drinking water, vector-borne diseases, injuries, and mental health problems.

The response this time must not stop at simple disaster relief. A public health emergency has already begun.

The immediate priorities are clear: rescue those trapped, treat the injured, and deliver food to displaced people. Yet the next wave of suffering can approach quietly. Disaster does not always arrive with the apocalyptic roar of raging water. At times it comes as a cup of dirty water, a broken toilet, a stagnant puddle, a missed vaccination, an untreated illness, a mother unable to receive needed care, or a hospital that exists on paper but is not reachable for older adults and people with disabilities.

Recovering and managing the dead is another immense task. As hospitals and local facilities are saturated with the dead and the wounded, human remains, livestock carcasses, and other organic debris are piling up along the downstream course of the river. Authorities must relocate bodies, expand mortuary capacity, and proceed with burials after securing DNA samples and other forensic evidence for identification.

Public health authorities must distinguish real risks from false beliefs about disasters. The bodies of people who die in natural disasters do not automatically trigger epidemics, because most victims die from trauma, drowning, or similar causes rather than infectious disease. The greater threats usually arise from contaminated water, poor sanitation, overcrowded shelters, unsafe food, disease vectors, collapse of health systems, and unsafe handling of human remains and animal carcasses.

There is another emergency, namely psychological trauma, and more severely, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma leaves no debris, requires no excavator, and appears in no satellite image.

Imagine watching your home, your means of livelihood, and your family vanish in minutes. Imagine waiting day after day for news of a missing spouse, parent, child, or colleague. Imagine that in a remote area, every time a helicopter appears, hope flickers that they might return. Imagine that after surviving the flood, you hear the roar of rushing water every night. Imagine waking drenched in sweat from a nightmare of being swept away by a massive current.

For many survivors, disaster does not end when rescue operations end. Long after the waters recede, the terror will remain etched in their minds. Many children have already lost their way in a jungle of pain and anxiety after witnessing family and friends swept away, homes submerged, and the familiar world they knew suddenly disappear.

Adults too may experience acute stress, nightmares, survivor guilt, grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Families of those still missing endure an especially cruel form of psychological suffering: the pain of mourning without even knowing whether the person has died.

Therefore mental health must not be treated as a luxury to be addressed only after roads are relaid and homes rebuilt. From the start of the response, psychological first aid, grief counseling, child-friendly spaces, community-based psychosocial support, and linkage to specialized services should be included.

For families living around Trishuli, Timure, and the Betrawati River, this flood did not simply destroy homes. It swept away the very assets that sustained livelihoods. Shops, livestock, farmland, equipment, vehicles, tourism, jobs, and even savings were all wiped out without a trace.

With roads and bridges destroyed, even households that still have assets may be unable to reach markets. Workers may have lost both their workplaces and their means of transport. Small businesses face reopening with no customers, no capital, and no functioning infrastructure.

Damage to hydropower facilities further amplifies the economic shock. A preliminary assessment by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) indicates that 11 hydropower plants with a total installed capacity of 431.1㎿(megawatts) and one solar plant have halted operations. Fifteen power projects under construction, with a planned capacity of 470㎿, were also damaged. The economic impact will therefore extend far beyond Rasuwa and Nuwakot. Yet, again, reconstruction must not become a pretext or political sleight of hand for rebuilding the same vulnerabilities in the same locations.

The greatest barrier may be access. Roads and bridges have vanished. Communications are cut. Debris blankets infrastructure. In some areas, helicopters are the only way to reach communities. Rescue teams trying to reach workers trapped in hydropower tunnels are battling enormous volumes of mud and debris.

Other barriers are less visible. How many people possess documents proving ownership of destroyed homes? If land records, citizenship papers, or bank records were washed away, who can receive compensation? If the main earner in a household is missing, who will speak on behalf of that family? What about women who lost livelihoods but cannot safely travel to distribution points? What happens to children whose schools have disappeared? What about migrant workers stranded in other areas while their family homes are gone? And what about residents of informal riverside settlements who may have had almost no legal rights to the land where they lived?

These are not secondary issues. How they are addressed will determine whether recovery proceeds fairly, or whether the disaster pushes people who are already vulnerable into even deeper poverty.

What survivors need is not sympathy. What they need is to have their rights guaranteed. The response must therefore move beyond charity toward rights-based recovery. Survivors are not simply victims waiting for the goodwill of others. They are holders of rights. They have rights to life and health, food, water, sanitation, housing, information, and dignity, and the right to participate in decisions that affect their future.

The state and responsible institutions have a duty to guarantee these rights. Aid must therefore be transparent and inclusive. Vulnerable households must not become invisible on beneficiary lists. Women and children, older adults, people with disabilities, Indigenous and marginalized communities, and people living in poverty require particular attention. Above all, survivors must be able to raise their voices in the reconstruction process.

The Bhotekoshi–Trishuli–Betrawati calamity must be a turning point in how Nepal views mountain disasters. What is needed is not sophisticated sensors displayed on a dashboard in Kathmandu, but an early warning system that truly works and delivers alerts to the very last household. Real-time communication is needed among China, Nepal, and downstream communities. Hazard maps and evacuation routes, safe shelters, and regular community evacuation drills are needed.

Health facilities resilient to climate change and stockpiles of emergency medicines are needed. Psychological first aid must be integrated into disaster response. Social protection systems that can swiftly deliver cash to households that lost their livelihoods are also needed. Far stricter scrutiny is required for infrastructure development in high-risk river corridors.

Above all, recovery must not mean simply rebuilding what the flood destroyed as it was before. This deadly disaster has exposed the cost of development that has carried vulnerability within it. The torrent may have been exceptional. Yet in a warming Himalaya, the exceptional is rapidly becoming the everyday, and our excuses ever more ordinary. The question now is not whether another disaster will come, but whether, when it does, we will once again be unprepared.

The first emergency was saving people from the water. The second emergency is saving survivors from everything the water left behind. The water has receded. Now the disaster governance of Nepal faces a true test.