Kathmandu, September 14 The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Auth

From Onlinekhabar English

Kathmandu, September 14 The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority says the Rasuwa flood claimed at least 1,386 lives, with 5,130 people still unaccounted for. According to the Authority’s rapid damage and needs assessment report, the flood caused more than Rs 408 billion in damage, and reconstruction and risk-reduction work is expected to cost around Rs 712 billion. In his address to Parliament on September 2, Prime Minister Balendra Shah called the September 10 flood an “unimaginable disaster.” But was it really unimaginable, as the Prime Minister described it? Past study reports suggest otherwise. Just 14 months before this devastating flood, another flood from the same Lhende (Bhotekoshi) river had already caused major damage in Rasuwa. In the flood of July 8, 2025, 18 people went missing, with damage exceeding Rs 1.8 billion at the time. A study prepared after that flood had warned that glacial lake outburst floods were likely to increase in the future.