Nepal: Houses submerge in water as river overflows due to heavy rains
Kathamandu:
Heavy rains in Nepal triggered landslides on Monday that killed eight construction workers and two family members, bringing the number of floods and landslides since late May to 177.
Elsewhere in South Asia, the annual rainy season has brought more misery with at least 135 people killed in Bangladesh since late June in the longest flooding in more than two decades, while flooding has killed nearly 120 people and displaced millions in the Indian states. of Assam and Bihar.
Nepalese government official Murari Wasti told Reuters workers were sleeping in a tin-roofed shelter near the capital, Kathmandu, when the landslide hit.
“Rescuers dug in the mud and took out the eight bodies,” Wasti said. An injured worker was taken to hospital.
A second nearby landslide killed a woman and her husband.
Wasti said 57 people were missing and 111 injured in flooding or landslides caused by monsoon rains from May to September.
The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has also been affected by four soldiers killed last month as they rescued villagers trapped in the floods, officials said.
Conditions have complicated the poor region’s efforts to tackle the novel coronavirus, especially in densely populated Bangladesh, which has reported 240,746 infections and 3,154 deaths.
More than a million people are stranded in Bangladesh and thousands of hectares of land have been submerged, forcing more than 60,000 to settle in crowded shelters, said Enamur Rahman, deputy minister of the Ministry of Disaster Management. and relief.
“It’s really a challenge,” he said, while adding that efforts were being made to maintain social distancing.
Heavy rain runoff through the Indian mountains pushed the levels of many of Bangladesh’s rivers into the danger zone, said Arifuzzaman Bhuiyan, executive engineer at the Bangladesh Water Development Board, contributing to the worst flooding since 1998.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
