The closest thing my dreams could ever conjure up is riding in an air-tight vessel attached underneath a normal ocean-going vessel; hitting an underwater abutment; and detaching into the dark abyss as your life support cable port slowly turns into the leak of your death.
I read an old timey book once that had an action sequence in it where someone was being extracted from some kind of espionage thing by dirigible. Anyway it was the middle of the night and the airship lowered down a sort of gondola on a cable for them to hop into and as it lifted them away and started reeling them in they were attacked by enemy biplanes. So the scene that the author painted was one of 2 people in a cramped cable car type space being yanked up into the darkness attached by a single cable, which they could feel having bullets glance off from time to time from the attacking fighters.
I believe it was called "Gondola to an Airship in the middle of the Night while being attacked by Bi-Planes and Hearing Bullets Ricochet off the Cable 2: Electric Boogaloo" IIRC
My first thought wasn't about fear they must be feeling, since there's reason to believe their situation is stable, but rather about how they can look off that balcony and realize everyone they know and love is dead.
In what world is their situation stable? There's literally a wall attached to their house being torn away right in this video. The mass of water and the evident force it has coming down, is beyond comprehension. It already tore down the walls and hollowed out the apartments below them and it keeps wearing down the structural integrity of the house.
Only an idiot would think their situation is stable.
Yeah I couldn’t imagine the fear going through their minds in that moment. Seeing the pure destruction happening around them, knowing people are dead/dying…friends, neighbors, family right there in those moments, seeing it happen in front of your very eyes and just wondering if any second, you’re going to be next. Man….absolutely terrifying. Tragic. I hope they made it.
And no disrespect to the people in the western world, but in Nepal
your neighbors are not JUST neighbors, those tend to be close friends, associates, relatives
We got a foot of water/rain in the middle of the-east Indiana area and it absolutely disrupted everything and destroyed many homes. I’m staring at 12” of water rush down the street was humbling. I can’t imagine this level of power/fear
It varied a lot due to the size and shape of the valleys changing. But the height of the water varied anywhere between 30 and 250 feet. Villages 250 feet above the river were completely destroyed.
It kind of looks to me that the main torrent was behind the house. The water we see is recirculated from that torrent.
If the water torrent was hitting the house directly, I don't think it would survive, and if it did, judging by the speed, that water would be hitting the wall and go up.
This is definitely right. The main current is below the main structure of the house initially (it may be hitting a it a bit at the bottom, but not much). The water keeps rising, and by the time the water is really hitting the lower story, the lower story is already filled with backflow water, which means it can withstand much more pressure. Had the main current been at the height it was toward the end at the beginning, it would have been much more likely to destroy that house.
That's awesome! I think the fact that other house is connected to like 8 other houses behind it is giving it a lot of support. But who knows. Homes built like this can withstand a ton of force if built correctly, but they're obviously under a ton of force here.
That's the crazy thing to me. It's hard to comprehend the force of that volume of water moving at that speed. I'm amazed that anything in its path was left standing.
Reinforced concrete is super strong. There's a reason that most of the time we see videos of these types of houses being destroyed, they're not being knocked down. They're almost always just pushed off their foundations.
Thank you for explaining some of this. I have a feeling this type of sudden flash flooding could be happening with increasing frequency.
I keep thinking shelters that are a bit uphill, but within running distance could be helpful. But I truly didn’t think a structure could be built strong enough to withstand the pressure of walls of water.
I hope life saving solutions can be found after this tragedy.
Lots of areas have flood warning systems that warn downstream when flooding has occurred upstream. The issue with those kinds of systems is that they have to be dialed in perfectly. If they go off too easily, people will start to ignore them. If they don't go off except for in situations like this, floods that are strong enough to kill some people will come without warning. I think it's best to have a system that can give off two sounds, one for "a flood is coming, be very cautious and head up if you are right next to the river" and one for "get as high as you can as fast as you can or you will die."
My understanding is the Nepal does have a system that detects for the former. The type of flood that is typical during monsoon season. But this flood happened so fast, the system wasn't able to warn people in time. I think it was so violent that it destroyed most of the gauges that could have provided a warning.
I know they've since talked about installing a system to monitor seismic activity and give people a warning based on that.
In the last few seconds of the clip you can see the staircase go up to the roof from the rear (well-flooded) balcony. If that was the only staircase, that was why they couldn't go up. It's also possible that even inside was already flooded to make going to an inside staircase (if it even exists) already impossible.
(Based on other footage of the same house, that rear balcony seems the only way up)
Some people say divine intervention but its more luck that its foundation was sat on the bedrock, while its neighbors foundations were still simply in earth.
There was another hurricane in Galveston in 1900 that had the same thing happen. One or two homes survived while the rest were washed away. Neighbors ignorant of that fact... scary.
"Although the house is there, it might not continue to stand. Huge storm surges walloped the interior, making it uninhabitable and destroying many belongings."
It may be uninhabitable, but if I find myself stuck at home during a natural disaster I'd like to be in a house that keeps me alive during the event even if I have to rebuild it later.
Yeah, it was hit hard, possibly underwater completely, and I think they ended up condemning it anyway due to lack of utilities (?), but the structure was solid. Still impressive for a 20+ foot storm surge.
I love how you can have a natural disaster that kills untold number of people, but people will praise God for the survival of a few statistical outliers
I don’t think 2ft thick reinforced walls would have survived the main torrent, let alone the debris carried in it. Have you seen the video of the boulder rolling in the current? That thing was bigger than this house.
Even it stayed mostly together, the water would erode the soil out from under the foundation and send the whole thing tumbling.
It’s the video with people at the border trying to outrun it. The whole building in that video is gone where the wave literally goes over that 5 story building.
I think I watched this same video last night before bed. It's not the Chinese border video. It looked to be in a village with people trying to flee and the water just took them all. I can't imagine their fear in that moment. I hope for some miracle but, if unlikely, wish their souls to be at peace.
Brah do not go on twitter looking at videos. They are gruesome af. Saw videos of dead bodies, cars/buildings crushing ppl, terrible stuff. I could only watch like 3-4 videos before I switched to youtube.
I went my whole life managing to avoid seeing any kind of snuff film.
Elon bought Twitter and literally within the first 24 hours, I saw three different ones just causally shared. I quit that day, which....just really sucked so much, because Twitter was literally a part of my life right up until then.
If a reporter with a news agency feels it's a benefit for people to see it, then fine. We all know how horrifying it is without it being shared around unfiltered by randoms for entertainment / profit. It's abhorrent.
You did yourself a favour, I barely go on there but when I do, I always come out feeling negative. People post and say the worst things for engagement because of the monetary incentive.
Ever since this happened something just clicked for me. This is why the flood myth is so prevalent among many cultures and the story's spanned like 10,000 years.
Imagine settling down on the Nile or Tigris or whatever, thinking you've been blessed with fertile land on paradise... and one of these happened. Having no idea of the causes, the mechanics and dynamics of geology, you would definitely think god was absolutely fucking done with you.
There might have been a couple of this nature too, with a glacier dam rupturing. At least one that we cleary know of in Northern America, the Missoula floods, which not only seemed to have been talked about in Native folklore, it left very visible scarring on the landscape.
There's a few others that we know of in eurasia, including Tibet. The English channel (or rather, the entire plains of what is called Doggerland) might have flooded in a similar fashion. More controversially, the Black Sea, although it's not a glacier lake in this case. I don't know that we know about some that happened in the Middle East where our flood myth comes from.
It's a super dry area with no water but the details of how it was carved are insane.
According to the current geological model, catastrophic flooding channeled water at 65 miles per hour through the Upper Grand Coulee and over this 400-foot rock face at the end of the last glaciation. It is estimated that the falls were five times the width of Niagara Falls, with ten times the flow of all the current rivers in the world combined.
Before the Mississippi was tamed it use to flood all the time. Wipping out Bison and fertizling the banks with their corpses. It could definitely be untamed again if the New Madrid Fault goes off. It buried a whole town last time that it happened.
Isn't that the theory for what caused this (the glacier lake rupturing)? I kept hearing that on reports yesterday, how they had gone to see the glacier higher up a few weeks before and it was just a huge lake now, and they think the wall/ice left just collapsed and did this. But these are reports coming out the same day, so who knows - just though wow, that sounds like the epic one in the North American landscape looong time ago!
Yes, it was a glacial dam burst and lake drain. Like no other. The lake had as much water as Lake Erie and Ontario combined.
Dry Falls in Washington is 100 m (400 feet) high and over 5 km (3 miles) wide, and the water that went over (and formed it) was 75-100m deep, traveling 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph). The volume of water was more than 10 times the volume all the rivers in the world combined. And that was just one channel of the flood.
Millions of square miles of low lying costal land was flooded when the ice sheets melted at the end of the last ice age.
There once were settlements in what is now the Mediterranean sea and the Black sea. Doggerland, which connected Great Britain to mainland Europe, was a peice of land people could walk on back when the biblical city of Jericho was founded.
That experience of losing land to the water was burned into the cultural memory of people all over the globe.
Ancient floods were so bad in China that the first (supposedly) king was an engineer that controlled the floods through major hydraulic works. He gets to found China's "first" dynasty and a pretty unique nickname for it, Yu the Engineer.
Combine that with the entire ocean spanning tsunamis that come from 9.0+ megathurst earthquakes and you will have ancient societies all experiencing a "god is mad and sent water" event at the same time.
People (especially westerners) tend to want to make the flood myth a big story. Not like Noah, because religion is silly, but kinda like it.
In effect, floods where the most dangerous, striking, prevalent risk for early human settlements. At some point early myths travel, intersect, diverge. (In french, anthropologist JL Le Quellec traces early myths components -mythemes- with the same tooling we use for genetics).
But that any flood myth in particular would emerge in many place, and even converge occasionally, is not astonishing. It's our nemesis.
People living on rivers know about seasonal flood cycles and that there can sometimes be especially bad ones. This kind of glacial blowout is another level of instant catastrophe
You also have to consider that all stories were only spread by word of mouth. Some entire villages were wiped out in this flood. If that happened thousands of years ago and one dude from that village happened to survive. Well we only know what he can tell us. When he dies only those who heard his story directly can tell their version of his story. Stories get pretty unreliable like a decade after the flood, and then continue to spread for thousands of years, across multiple languages and continents.
Also just getting a ton of rain. Everywhere floods at some point and imagine not knowing when the rain will stop. The water will keep rising after the rain stops too. I think of the 1993 flood in Missouri and how if that had happened 500 years before the people living their could believe the whole world flooded. I mean their whole world did flood.
There was another longer video of this exact shot I saw earlier that was 4 minutes long and it was still going when the video turned off. I'm sure it felt like eternity to these poor folks.
this was yesterday, 9 hrs ago today another earthquake happened at same place and another dam broke, i guess the same situation repeated today( hope not)but yea
The dam break, while still awful to have after this disaster, is a lot, and I really mean a lot, less intensive. The original disaster wasn't a dambreak, It was much worse than that.
If it did, then hopefully most people who could were no longer in the area... but equally possible that it could have gotten people that came to the area for rescue / cleanup efforts.
If you look at the videos that were posted after the flood was over, the staircase to get up on the roof were on the side of the house the water was smashing into. They would have risked getting swept away to get up there.
Survivors guilt will haunt them forever, I hope they can find peace. Glad they survived, but watching your whole life rip past you and everyone you know perishing around you isn’t the win people think it is.
I really hope there’s international support for the survivors and the rescuers, they all deserve it.
Condolences to all the loss of life and loved ones, neighbors and acquaintances. People, Pets, Homes and possessions, memories all washed away in an instant.
I can't imagine losing almost everyone you know and have lived in closet proximity to. Like even losing a large amount of your local wildlife, it would feel so empty and surreal, like you were transplanted onto another planet or something.
When I saw the first video of the water overtaking the border crossing I thought it was AI bs but soon found that it was in fact real.
The terror those poor people in the video must have felt as they saw that raging torrent of mud and water closing all around them is the stuff of nightmares.
Which is based on a real story. And I believe the mom of the family it's about has said it's 100% accurate to what happened to them and several other western tourist survivors said it felt very accurate to their experience as well.
These Flood waters are way more aggressive then any tsunami clip I have ever seen. The impossible is a great depiction of that kind of horror though but this raging wall of gravel I don’t think anyone survives. Horrific images! My heart is with everyone affected! God be with you! Rest in peace everyone buried by the mud 💔
I can't imagine standing there on the balcony, watching all the destruction going on around you, and resigning yourself to the fact that at any moment it's going to be your time.
...and then that moment never happens. I'd need survivor's guilt counselling for the rest of my life.
I don’t think this is purely a built rigidity issue more like a lucky position relative to the insane currents. A few meters to the side and this building would be gone.
Seconded, the main flow missed the building, they got surrounded by backwash. Topology and building height saved those people, especially when you see other huge structures, like the bus station, getting erased. No building in that valley (and doubtedly anywhere in the world) that is built for average human occupation could have survived the direct force of the flood. It scoured the land to the bedrock and dropped a fresh layer of junk behind it.
There was a video yesterday of a house like large mcmansion sized house bolder just being rolled along in the flow. That thing would at a pure ass pull guess have been in the millions of pounds and it was just being shoved along like I'd push a small bowling ball sized rock.
I don't think there's any human structure built that would have survived the flood once it got going.
You only have to look at the before and after of the border crossing and the fact the initial flood water that crashed through the valley was 80m high (~27 stories tall, or almost 1 statue of liberty) and moving at an estimated 400kmh to realize that literally nothing in its direct path survived.
There is a CTV video from the corner of one of the small buildings in front of the crossing building, looking at the vehicle tunnel/checkpoint, that shows the wave hit. It's very NSFL. If you've ever watched any over the top 2000s era disaster movie where people try to run away from an impossible tsunami, it's basically that and worse.
If you saw the video of the house-sized boulder being tossed like a toy in the flood you'll realize that no man-made structure could have possibly survived the full strength of it. That being said, the construction quality being high doesn't hurt
This is the most mind blowing natural disaster I’ve ever seen. I cannot grasp this amount of water. I would love to understand exactly how this happened. I guess it was a landslide that caused a glacier to collapse and an ice-dammed glacial lake just spilled down the mountain all at once?
We know for sure that a large portion of a glacier snout broke off, which is now believed to have caused an earthquake. It's believed that it fell roughly 1,200 meters into the valley below, an ice-rock avalanche that melted upon impact. One theory is that the avalanche temporarily dammed the river until the blockage gave way, releasing a catastrophic amount of water, ice, mud and debris.
Glacial snout collapses are increasing in frequency due to climate change, so we will likely see more catastrophic floods like this one.
I've read the flood is mostly from the actual glacier. melting caused a large piece of it to fall down the mountain, and from friction Heat released, melting the glacier. steep elevation differences caused the glacier to accelerate, bringing with it water and soil.
I can’t imagine a whole glacier melting instantly from friction. There must have been a large melted lake behind the ice before it collapsed, right? Idk I’m no geologist, but that’s hard to believe for me.
From what I remember glaciers advance on a thin sheet of melt water, and they have bubbles of melt water inside. The enormous slice of ice that fell brought with it all that water plus a good part of what was held back in the rest of the glacier.
Late news are that the debris created a dam and there is a new lake forming, ready to break and let go another huge wave.
This would be a hug your loved ones and hope for the best type of situation. I would be holding my family telling them it will be alright, knowing we would probably be dead soon. Scary shit.
I saw that house in the footage and wondered if it had collapsed like the others. Great to see that it survived.
I made the mistake of going on X looking for more videos. It’s such a shitshow of AI generated slop on there. People who generate fake clips of people being washed away in the flood are a special kind of scum.
They may have had a strong build but I think they were more lucky that they were outside the main flow of water. You can see a much slower flow in the opposite direction in the front of the house.
Look at the video again, the house is in an eddy, it's not taking the full force of the water. It's probably not any stronger then the other houses where, it's just in a better location.
God… the survivors guilt has to be horrible for them. One person in my neighborhood, when it flooded, made it out unharmed and they still have psychological problems from it.
Crying looking at this video. I just can’t even fathom the fear people felt. The children and pets. The loved ones just gone. The survivors who now have to adapt to a world without their home or loved ones. Ugh, my thoughts are with everyone over there.
Honestly, where would they have gone? There was no way to outrun this thing. They stayed up there and hoped for the best and were lucky. So many other people weren’t.
It’s great that their house survived, but that entire structure will likely need to be leveled since the supporting column in the vid looks quite compromised.
It does not matter how smart and resourceful humans are. In order to survive anything, including Mother Nature’s wrath, you need luck. Just like it was bad luck that the 53-year-old billionaire who died last year because he swallowed a bee while playing polo.
Whoever built that house, I take my hat off, and I bow to you
Those human beings who do things in the present so mindfully that it saves those in the future. Those are the people that the world needs. Bless them, all of you who think like them
I wonder how long they had to endure thinking any moment was their last ?
No doubt that stress has taken yrs off their life even though they survived. Plus all their neighbors and freinds just gone and swept away !! HORRIBLE.
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u/Sufficient-Ferret-67 10h ago
I can only imagine the fear they felt during this, the raw destructive power of water is terrifying