Devastation across Nepali towns following deadly flood that killed more than 600 people
Devastation across Nepali towns following deadly flood that killed more than 600 people
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A police dog team was combing half-buried houses in the devastated town of Devighat on Saturday, looking for corpses.
Over the doorways filled with silt and debris, ornate signs carry the inhabitants’ family name or Hindu blessings, signs of the domesticity ruined when the nearby Trishuli river burst its banks in Nepal’s worst natural disaster in years.
A search team member poked a cane into the feet-deep silt to detect any sign of a body beneath it.
Nearby, the putrefied carcass of a buffalo lay by the road and its stench saturated the air.
The 14-member police team from the capital Kathmandu and their two dogs have been working from dawn til dusk for the past four days.
“It breaks my heart,” Krishna, one of the policemen, who did not want to give his last name, told CNN.
“We’ve been coming here for three to four days already. My heart breaks that we haven’t been able to find people. I’m sad that our Nepali people are having to suffer like this.”
The last body police had pulled out was earlier this morning, of a young man. He was wearing blue jeans, Krishna said, but there was little else to identify him by. “His body had already decomposed,” Krishna said.
Tallying the dead and missing is laborious, Krishna the policeman said. Teams like his, deployed from other parts of the country, rely on the few locals still here for information on who is still missing and where they were last seen.
One policeman and a dog scrambled over debris into what once was a small shop to check the shop owner’s registration certificate fixed to the wall.
One man dug with a shovel trying to get into the ground floor to begin the long task of seeing if anything was salvageable. Others walked by carrying possessions; a microwave, a set of chairs and cooking pots.