Sept 9 (Reuters) – The photos tell a story of lives, interrupted.
The schoolroom, gaily decorated with paintings and letters. The paint shop, where the shelves still contain rows of once colourful cans. The bathroom, the closet that held neatly piled clothing, the yards. All are now covered with a thick layer of river mud that descended without warning on bustling communities.
As the waters recede, the survivors remain stunned, grieving and praying.
A string of miracle rescues in recent days has kept hopes alive that more people might still be saved from the catastrophe of August 26 when a glacier collapsed, sending a mass of mud and rock crashing into a river along the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet. The resulting floods washed away villages, snapped highways like twigs, and buried homes in the mud.
At least 1,380 bodies have so far been pulled from the wreckage, some far downstream from the site of the disaster. A wall outside a Kathmandu hospital plastered with photos and desperate appeals hints at the unfinished story of an estimated 5,500 people who remain missing.
Reuters photographers have been on the ground in Nepal and Tibet, capturing the difficult aftermath and looking out for the moments to communicate the scale of the devastation.
For Adnan Abidi, a muddied pink school bag provided that moment.
“It isn’t just a piece of debris; it is the sudden, terrifying end of a school morning,” said Abidi. “An abandoned school bag with familiar cartoon characters brings the macro-tragedy down to a deeply human scale.”
Photographer Francis Mascarenhas used a drone to show the destruction from a distance, but also sought a close-up human story, finding at the Maithili Barrack army training centre a quiet moment for a health worker, being cared for by a colleague during a break from the grim task of identifying bodies.
Navesh Chitrakar took one of the emblematic images of the last two weeks — that of an elderly lady, covered in mud and dazed but alive, sitting in the bucket of a backhoe loader as it moves her to safety hours after the disaster. These diggers were some of the only vehicles able to make it through the heavy silt.
Reuters was not able to establish the identity of the woman. Locals told Chitrakar she had been trapped in a care home.
“This picture to me is a sign of hope,” Chitrakar said. “It showed there were survivors — a positive and hopeful message for rescuers.”
By the second week, the rescue had shifted largely to three hydropower project tunnels where dozens of workers were believed to be trapped. Nine days after the flooding, Athit Perawongmetha took pictures from an army base of survivor Sanjay Sah, extracted from one of the tunnels, being carried out on a stretcher to be airlifted to Kathmandu. It was a sign of life that lifted the spirits of the rescue workers, digging through tunnels blocked by the relentless grey sludge.
Away from the rescue sites, Tyrone Siu has been looking for new ways to tell the still-evolving story.
“Everyone remembers the dramatic footage when the water’s peaking, but the real nightmare starts after the cameras leave and the floodwaters drop,” he said. He took an image of a road to nowhere, a highway now swept away.
“This frame is about the mud-soaked void left behind, lives frozen in place, people forced to scrape together some shred of dignity out of a pile of wreckage,” Siu said. “It’s the long, lonely hangover of a disaster.”
(Writing by Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
