Buried by Mud, Remembered by Love: Nepal’s Survivors Reckon with a Catastrophic Landslide

The rain had finally stopped over the green terraced hills of central Nepal, but the silence it left behind was almost unbearable. Where a cluster of stone houses had stood just hours earlier, there was now only a raw wound in the earth—a thick, brown river of mud and splintered timber that had poured into the valley below. On the morning after the catastrophic landslides that struck Nepal in late September, survivors crawled out of the debris with bare hands, shouting the names of loved ones into the fog. In Pharping, a village on the southern edge of the Kathmandu Valley, that desperate roll call began what has become a gruelling search for the missing and the dead. More than 200 people were killed across the country as relentless monsoon rain unleashed landslides and flash floods that swallowed entire neighbourhoods, turned roads into rivers, and transformed hillsides into graves overnight. The disaster was among the deadliest Nepal has experienced in recent years, and even as rescue teams raced against time, the full scale of the devastation remained agonizingly unclear.

In the wreckage of a village that no longer appears on any map, survivors have become the memory keepers of people and places buried beneath metres of mud. Fifty-two-year-old Goma Thapa stood on a ridge overlooking what used to be her neighbour’s house, wrapped in a blanket donated by a relief team, her voice reduced to a whisper. She recounted how the landslide arrived not as a violent roar but as a low, grinding rumble that grew louder as the night wore on. By the time she and her family scrambled to higher ground, the mud had already swallowed the lower half of the settlement, and the houses of at least a dozen families were gone. “We heard children crying, but the mud was too deep and too fast,” she said, her eyes fixed on the grey sludge below. “When the sun came up, everything was silent. The place where my sister lived had simply disappeared.” Her sister, her sister’s husband, and their two children are among the hundreds missing. Similar scenes unfolded across the region as rescue workers pulled survivors from the debris and retrieved the bodies of those who could not escape the torrent of earth and rock.

The places buried under the mud were not just clusters of houses; they were the anchors of entire communities, each with its own history, traditions, and shared memory. In the mountain villages of the Bagmati province, the landslides wiped out schools that had been the pride of remote settlements, demolished temples that had stood for centuries, and erased the simple homes that generations of families had built by hand. Lalit Bahadur Gurung, a 68-year-old farmer from the outskirts of Dhading, spent two days walking to the nearest road after his village was buried in a single night. He carried only a torn bag of rice and an oil lamp his grandfather had used, one of the few possessions he managed to grab before fleeing. “That lamp is all I have left of three generations,” he said solemnly. “Our temple, our courtyard, the fields my father carved into the mountain—all gone. The place that shaped my entire life is now a brown swamp.” For many survivors, the loss is not merely structural but existential; the physical spaces that anchored their identity, their memories, and their sense of belonging have vanished beneath the earth, leaving only grief and disorientation in their wake.

Rescue and relief operations have been a harrowing struggle against geography and weather. The Nepal Army, police, and paramilitary forces were deployed within hours of the disaster, but the landslides had severed roads and buried footpaths, forcing rescue teams to trek for days through deep mud and pounding rain to reach the most isolated villages. Helicopters flew dozens of sorties into narrow valleys, airlifting the injured and dropping emergency supplies to survivors stranded on high ground. In Kathmandu, volunteers formed human chains to clear debris from flooded streets, while medics worked around the clock at makeshift triage centres set up in schools and community halls. Yet the scale of the tragedy quickly overwhelmed the available resources. Heavy machinery struggled to reach the hardest-hit areas, and in many places, rescuers had to rely on handheld digging tools and their own bare hands, painfully aware that each hour diminished the chances of finding survivors. International aid agencies warned that the full extent of the damage might not be known for weeks, as dozens of remote hamlets remained completely cut off from the outside world.

Experts have long warned that Nepal sits on the front line of a growing climate crisis, and the September disaster has become a painful illustration of the country’s vulnerability. The monsoon rains that pounded the Himalayan nation in 2024 were far more intense than the seasonal norms, a pattern that climate scientists attribute to a warming atmosphere capable of holding more moisture. But the catastrophe was compounded by human factors: unchecked construction on unstable slopes, haphazard road building that destabilized mountain faces, and the relentless clearing of forests that once anchored fragile soils. Geologists have pointed to a combination of steep terrain, poorly planned development, and increasingly erratic rainfall as a deadly recipe that is now being served again and again. Nepal has experienced devastating landslides for centuries, but the frequency and intensity of these events are rising. Homes that were built with little regard for landslide risk, on slopes that showed visible signs of cracking, were the most vulnerable when the earth finally let go. In the aftermath, there have been urgent calls for stricter land-use regulations, better early-warning systems, and a national dialogue on how to protect communities in a rapidly changing climate.

Yet even as the mud begins to dry and the despair threatens to harden, the survivors of this catastrophe have shown a remarkable determination to rebuild. In the makeshift camps that now dot the high ridges, families share food, blankets, and the stories of those they lost, creating new bonds out of shared tragedy. Relief teams are distributing seeds, tools, and materials so that farmers can begin the slow process of reclaiming their livelihoods, while children who miraculously survived are being enrolled in temporary schools assembled from tarpaulins and donated books. A young man in Pharping, who lost his mother and two siblings, has taken to guiding rescue dogs through the rubble, hoping that the search for the missing will bring closure to at least a few families. “We cannot bring back the villages that were buried,” he said, wiping mud from his face. “But we can honour the people we loved by building again, more carefully and more safely than before.” The road ahead is long, strained by grief and by the immense practical challenges of rebuilding in dangerously fragile terrain. But in the courage of survivors, in the tireless work of local volunteers, and in the quiet determination to record the names of every person and every place swallowed by the mud, Nepal has begun the painful, heartbreaking work of healing. The world watches, and for now, the people of Nepal hold on to each other and to the memory of what was lost.