2015 quake drove Haku families to flood-hit Trishuli banks

TRISHULI BAZAAR (NEPAL): Hundreds of Tamang families uprooted from Haku and adjoining mountain villages in Nepal's Rasuwa district by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake were still living in settlements along the Trishuli river 11 years later when the Aug 26 flood swept through Khalte, Pairebesi, Mailung and adjoining areas.Around 100 children are sheltering at the Shivalaya Basic School in Uttargaya after the disaster, with 60 students left without both parents.Prakash Nepal, a teacher at Shri Nilkantha Secondary School, linked the toll to the post-quake displacement. "The displaced settlements were relocated along the riverbank," he told TOI. "That is why there was such a heavy human toll this time." The school had around 550 students; nearly 200 remain out of contact, while four staff are also missing. Three other schools were also destroyed.Khalte was among the worst-hit. It had 257 houses before the flood and not one remained intact, said Purna Bahadur Ghale, 43, an executive member of Uttargaya Rural Municipality whose family had been displaced in 2015. "I must have gone to Singha Durbar more than a hundred times to ask govt to move us somewhere safer," he said. "They always said they would, but they never did." Seven of his relatives were missing.The chain of displacement began after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on April 25, 2015, triggered landslides and rockfalls across Haku, Gogane, Tiru and Mailung. The authorities moved hundreds of families into shelters downhill. A final assessment released in June 2017 identified 113 households for relocation and found Gogane, Tiru and Mailung unsuitable for habitation. But the place where many families subsequently settled - Khalte on Trishuli's bank - was itself later assessed as unsafe. By 2019, a total of 269 displaced families were living there.Attempts to move them permanently repeatedly stalled. The danger along the river was already evident. On July 8, 2025, rapid discharge from a supraglacial lake on Purepu Glacier in Tibet sent a flash flood down the Lende-Bhotekoshi-Trishuli corridor, killing at least nine people and leaving 19 missing. Weeks later, after Khalte was hit by another flood, resident Lalmaya Tamang, 29, warned: "The river can take everything at any time."A year later, many of the same families were displaced once again.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.