Nepali labourer Bibek Kumal was digging a toilet pit outside a newly built house on Wednesday when a wall of water, mud and rock came roaring down, sweeping him and everything near him away.
Kumal, 24, was working in Bidur, downstream from the worst-hit Rasuwa district, near Nepal’s Himalayan border with China’s Tibet, when he heard a hissing sound. His four co-workers, standing above the five-foot (1.5 metre) deep pit, shouted at him to get out and run.
By the time he scrambled out of the pit, his co-workers had already fled.
“I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it was an earthquake,” Kumal said from his bed at Kathmandu’s National Trauma Centre, his brother Dinesh sitting beside him.
The torrent swept him downstream amid mud and debris, but “luckily I was stuck up in a mango tree”, he said. “Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death.”
Reuters
