KATHMANDU, Sept 4 – Property, housing and infrastructure worth at least 387.5 billion Nepalese rupees ($2.56 billion) was lost in Nepal’s catastrophic floods last week, the country’s disaster authority chief told Reuters on Friday.
In the first four months of early recovery, the estimated cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $52.6 million, Dharma Raj Upreti, chief of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, said.
“These are estimated amounts. We have calculated this in coordination with different concerned agencies and departments,” Upreti said, adding that a detailed assessment would be done soon.
Nepal will need to rebuild around 20,000 houses in flood-ravaged areas, Upreti said on Thursday, with at least 7,500 of those homes destroyed.
The collapse of a glacier sent a flood of ice, rock and mud down the Trishuli River in Nepal’s border region with China on August 26, wiping out towns and villages and killing more than 1,250 people, with more than 4,200 still missing and thousands displaced.
($1 = 151.1800 Nepalese rupees)
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Tom Hogue; Editing by Saad Sayeed)
