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Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees
AC360: On the Ground in Nepal After Devastating Floods; U.N.: 65K People Require Emergency Support; Police: 24 Bodies Recovered from a House in Nepal; 950 Plus Dead, 4,400 Plus Missing After Catastrophic Nepal-China Floods; 5-Year-Old Girl Found Alive After Nearly 60 Hours Buried In Debris; Families Search For Missing Loved Ones After The Nepal Flood; Nepal Market Town Buried Under Flood Debris. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired August 31, 2026 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: A plane must be 1,000 feet over a congested area and 500 feet from people or structures everywhere else. Anything outside of that needs to get a special blessing for the Federal Aviation Administration. In this case, spectators seem to think this flyby was pretty great. But aviation experts say if spectators knew the margins were so close, they might think otherwise -- Erin.
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Pete, thank you very much. I mean, just to think about that, right, 100 feet, 58,000 people were sitting there. We'd be talking about one of the greatest disasters of all time. Thank you so much for joining us. AC360 starts right now.
[20:00:34]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "ANDERSON COOPER: 360": Good evening, it is early Tuesday morning here in Nepal. The sun is just now coming up just as it did last Wednesday, a little more than six days ago.
Now, as we stand here, though, more than 4,400 men, women and children who were just waking up that day are missing tonight, nearly a thousand others are known to have been killed. Hundreds of the missing are workers in hydropower facilities, which run all along the rivers that exploded last Wednesday and it is very possible that many of those workers may have been trapped in tunnels at many of the hydropower projects that became flooded and blocked.
Now, I want to show you some video of Nepali troops trying to make their way through the rubble and cement like mud down one of those tunnels. Crews are also working to gain access to some of the tunnels in other ways from the surface, using jackhammers, heavy earth moving equipment, if they can find it where they can find it. And it goes without saying that time is of the essence, and this work is going on round the clock. Theres other grimmer work as well for the earth mover's crews in one location, digging a mass grave over the weekend for hundreds whose loved ones cannot travel to claim their remains because roads and bridges are out, or because they themselves are also missing or dead.
According to Chinese-Nepali authorities, more than 950 people have died, and that number has been climbing for days. At the same time, Nepal's Prime Minister says that more than 11,000 people have been rescued since last Wednesday, including one young girl who was trapped for two-and-a-half days in the rubble downstream from her home, which is very near the border with Tibet. She has since been reunited with her parents here in Kathmandu.
And CNN's Will Ripley spoke to her parents, and he is going to join me shortly.
But even for survivors, the challenges are immense. A U.N. spokesman estimates that 65,000 people here will need emergency water and sanitation and hygiene support. And though Nepali government says putting up temporary bridges is a priority, significant parts of the region are inaccessible by road, and others. I've been seeing firsthand simply do not exist anymore, erased from the world in just seconds, by 120 mile an hour wall of river, rubble, ice and mud six mornings ago.
The exact number of missing is hard to know, according to Nepali authorities, at least 900 workers at hydropower projects all along the river are unaccounted for, as I said, and there is a belief that some of them might be trapped inside tunnels connected to those facilities.
I spent several hours yesterday at two different sites where rescue operations are underway. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER (voice over): We've seen remarkable rescues of workers stuck in sludge filled tunnels. But six days after the flood, hundreds may still be trapped. Hope is getting harder to hold on to.
In Syabru Besi today, we came across an Indian Army colonel leading his specialized troops in rescue operations in two nearby tunnels with Nepali forces.
PARIKSHIT MEHRA, INDIAN ARMY: We hope that we find somebody alive. Otherwise, we should be able to at least recover the remains of those people.
COOPER (on camera): And did you have any communication from them?
MEHRA: We tried to communicate voice communication. So, we couldn't because, you know, there were a lot of debris in the tunnel, in the small tube. And so, we couldn't make any visual communication, but we try to shout and things like that. But nothing people were stuck tend to panic much more than when they're outside in the open. And, you know, at least they can breathe fresh air, getting stuck in a tunnel, you can't see anything. You generally see if you stay in the dark, you get disoriented about 24, 25 hours.
COOPER: That fast.
MEHRA: Yes, so 24 to 25 hours in the dark, you tend to believe normal, average, untrained human being would start losing balance, you know, because you lose orientation. So that happens and then beyond that, say anything 48 hours, you start hallucinating and then I think from there on, it's always a fight. So, I think the first 48 hours is the most crucial. But there have been miracles and we expecting miracles everywhere. And the Nepal government is doing a fantastic job wherein they've sent in teams to all parts. The Nepalese Army is just everywhere.
COOPER (voice over): Further down river at the Trishuli 3A Hydropower Plant, we find another rescue operation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Healthy forces from APF, Nepal police, Nepali Army and Special Forces and even the sniffer dogs here. So, we can see here this is a cable tunnel. So, 170 meters inside there's a powerhouse.
[20:05:06]
COOPER: That many, 45 to 50?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, because they are the working team inside the powerhouse.
COOPER: And they were here when the when the flood came?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the flood hit this area, they were inside, right? So, we are trying now to excavate all this way and you can see the guys there, they are drilling there.
COOPER: Do you have any sign that they're alive?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, earlier, earlier we tried a vertical drilling there so that they might be some presence of oxygen so that we can send some oxygen there. I hope, I hope they are --
COOPER: But you have, you haven't had signs of life.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have nothing yet.
COOPER: So, this was completely submerged, this tunnel was completely --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can see this; it's about 10 to 15 meters deep. All the debris have just been on top of the tunnel. So, you could see the road was there and it's all so we have to, it was all the splashes. It was, it came down rolling through the downstream, you know. So it just buried all the whole damn thing.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well, I'm joined now by Nepal's first female helicopter Captain, Priya Adhikari, who has already flown around 100 rescue missions in just the last few days since the flood. You must be exhausted. I thank you for being here.
CAPTAIN PRIYA ADHIKARI, NEPAL'S FIRST FEMALE HELICOPTER CAPTAIN: You're welcome, yes, I think most of us are already exhausted, yes, because of all the flights we've been doing.
COOPER: It's incredible what you've done.
ADHIKARI: Yes. Thank you. Yes, we are trained for this. We've been doing rescues and dead bodies flights for a long time already. But inside this small, you know, small valley where you've been. Yes, it's a small place where so many people went missing.
COOPER: It's extraordinary that you, I mean, the valley, is so close and you are flying through this. It's extraordinary.
ADHIKARI: Yes, just imagine 20 helicopters flying on that valley continuously talking with each other. That is actually a little bit of pressure to navigate and to radio at the same time, and to know who is going where. And we are going to the same place, evacuating from the same place, like five or six helicopters landing. So, we need to talk with each other so frequently. Yes, that is actually --
COOPER: And now, I mean, you are landing in places where the ground is like liquid cement. it's like, it's incredible.
ADHIKARI: Some of the places you have to be very careful because the helicopter might sink in.
COOPER: It looks from the air, I imagine, like I'm to a, to a novice. It looks like, oh, it's solid ground, it's a concrete.
ADHIKARI: No it's not concrete.
COOPER: You step in it and you sink.
ADHIKARI: Yes, that's how it is. It's mud, I don't know from where it came. It was not like that before. I don't know from where it came. So, it just, you cannot just go and land completely leave the helicopter. You have to be on the power all the time, yes.
COOPER: How do you, I mean, you are touching down in people's lives and touching their lives in the most --
ADHIKARI: This thing that happened, it's bigger than the earthquake we had in 2015. During the earthquake time it was in the different places of Kathmandu or in Nepal. But this is like in a small valley where so many people have lost life, but they the smile I have is for the survivors. I don't know how they survived. Every time I go inland, I see people around. I'm like waving at them and saying, like, you survived.
You know, the rescues that I'm doing, people lying down inside the helicopter trying to open their eyes. I smile at them and say, like, you survived.
COOPER: Do you, at knight do you wonder, oh, I wonder what happened to that person or this person? Or, or are there some there's so many people.
ADHIKARI: Well, I wondered about Radhika's mom and dad. I tried searching so much for them.
COOPER: Really?
ADHIKARI: Yes, the American-Indian couple.
COOPER: Have you talked to her?
ADHIKARI: Yes, I've talked with her. I'm in touch with her, I'll meet her. So, I tried finding, her family and I tried finding two of the Nepalese guy, one was working with Isha Foundation for volunteering and the other one is working at a bank in Timure. I tried finding them, yes, yes.
There are some people that that touches your heart in a different way. I tried finding them, yes, but there's no sign of life.
COOPER: How do you go about that? I mean, how does anybody go about finding anybody?
ADHIKARI: I know, yes, they're not my relatives but you know, the emotion that we carry and the, the area that we have been and the dead bodies you see from above, you know, did you see the dead body in Timure yesterday? They were lying down. So many dead bodies, you see from above you. I don't know how.
COOPER: They had white --
ADHIKARI: White, the white dead body bags that have all the -- so the most necessary thing right now there is a dead body bag because they're just taking out all the dead bodies and everything. And so, if your family was around Timure area, whoever have survived has to --
COOPER: Timure is very close to the border.
ADHIKARI: The last place --
COOPER: And it's where the little girl was found two and a half days alive who was in the hospital here in Kathmandu, in that area.
[20:10:17]
ADHIKARI: Yes, but not that close, that area, below that area. She was found alive, yes. That area, whoever was found alive was taken out immediately on first and second day. Whoever was injured or survived, locals, foreigners, everyone was taken out immediately, first and second day, we evacuated more than 200 people from there.
COOPER: Wow.
ADHIKARI: Yes, five or six helicopters and with Army's Agusta helicopter. Yes, more than 200 people, I guess from that area, from Timure only. Everything is gone. Five hydros is gone. All the lives are gone but still, the people who survived, you know, just smile for them, yes.
COOPER: Well, thank you so much. It's such an honor to meet you.
ADHIKARI: Thank you so much, it's my honor thank you. COOPER: Priya Adhikari, thank you. Thank you so much, truly incredible.
ADHIKARI: Yes, thank you.
COOPER: My next guest is playing a key role sometimes minute by minute advising teams on the ground at those hydropower tunnels, searching for survivors, anybody. Arnold Dix is a disaster and tunnel rescue expert who's joining us from Australia. He helped rescue more than 40 workers in a collapsed tunnel in India in 2023.
Arnold, thank you for being with us. You must be exhausted. I understand you're in a car. You're between remote meetings with rescuers here in Nepal. How do you do that? What is the latest you can tell us about the efforts to get into these tunnels, specifically into pockets where people.
How is it that some people can survive? Because a lot of these tunnels, they were covered in water, weren't they?
ARNOLD DIX, DISASTER EXPERT: So, we're dealing with something like what Priya was saying before, like we've never seen before. But the good thing is these tunnels are very resilient. So, some of the access tunnels, the parts that you're seeing, and you've got the footage of, but obviously they're full of rocks and mud and what have you, but they lead to power stations which are buried deep in the mountain.
And so, my mission is to try and access the power stations where were hoping that people have been able to survive the initial explosions. And, you know, they're there. So, we're accessing those voids which are in the mountain through the tunnels mostly. And this is just being updated all the time. So, if I get new information, then I share it with my colleagues we, you know, we revise our plans always.
Nothing ever goes according to plan. This is like nothing we've ever seen before. I've never been involved where a disaster is in multiple locations simultaneously and, as you heard, it's completely transformed. It's like a huge bomb has gone off. We couldn't even find the power stations for the first couple of days.
COOPER: Well, that's the thing. I mean, I've talked to a number of rescuers at sites and just finding the location of the tunnel was extremely, extremely difficult. A lot of rescuers I've talked to have talked about, I don't know if it's a storehouse or a powerhouse inside the tunnel and they think that people may be in there. What would being in there, what is that and why would that give somebody a better chance of surviving? Is there, sealed off in some way?
DIX: Yes. So, what it is, we're hoping that up inside the power station there's a power stations are built inside huge cavities like apartment blocks. And then inside those cavities are the turbines that generate the electricity and then feeding those cavities or tunnels. So, water in water out for the turbines. But in addition to that, power cables, utility cables, ventilation, tunnels, all sorts of things like that. So, with the engineering-built diagrams, with satellite imagery, with drones, with the images coming out of those helicopters. So, we'll get sent to us an image of a site coming, a helicopter try and compare it with the latest satellite data then compare that with what the topographic map used to look like, and then figure out what's under there. And then we go hunting, for the men in the power stations.
So, we, I'm calling it like the Goldilocks zone. We think that at the top of the powerhouse units, at a level, at the top, that's the most likely place where we will find people. And, that's, what all these missions are about getting in, getting into those, what we hope are safe places to rescue the people.
COOPER: The two sites that I've talked to, to rescuers at but both Nepali and Indian Army, they have not gotten proof of life. They have not heard sounds and yet they are still continuing full speed ahead around the clock.
[20:15:10]
DIX: Yes, that's what we do. So we are glass half full kind of guys like the Indian guys you were talking to, they are probably -- I haven't seen which ones they were, they worked with me on the Silkyara rescue a couple of years ago where we got the 41 people out.
COOPER: Yes.
DIX: We presume people are alive. And until we know anything different, we are optimists and we will do whatever it takes. We will adjust whatever strategy we've got, we will use whatever tools are available and we will find them. And that's our mission. That's what we do.
And it is dangerous.
COOPER: And the Indian Colonel I talked to was -- sorry, I was just saying the Indian Colonel who I met who is overseeing the operation that I saw, I believe he has two doctorates in tunnels and I mean, his knowledge was extraordinary and incredibly impressive.
Arnold Dix, I know you are incredibly busy. I appreciate you spending the time with us that you have. It is such an honor to talk to you.
Go ahead.
DIX: No, no, that would be Colonel Parikshit, I think. Was that Colonel?
COOPER: Yes. Yes, yes.
DIX: You're right. The expertise in India is, yes, so he and I, we worked like brothers in the rescue in 2023. Great guy. Really warm heart. This is the other thing, not just engineering. Like what the chopper pilot was just saying before, this is about humanitarian. This is about being a decent human being. This is like 21st century humans behaving responsibly. So he is a great guy and his team is fantastic.
Yes so --
COOPER: Well, Arnold, it has got to be surreal for you to be in Australia, and yet on the front lines here in Nepal at the same time and it is an honor to talk to you, Arnold. Thank you so, so much. We will talk to you in the days ahead.
One very quick additional bit of breaking news from Australia, just moments ago, we learned that an Australian Royal Air Force flight will be departing today, bringing badly needed supplies, including hygiene kits, shelter kits and solar kits into the country.
There are a number of Australians who are still missing here.
Just ahead tonight, the rescue of a little girl just five days old after two-and-a-half days in the rubble, now reunited with her parents. We will hear from them. And later, I connected with the daughter of two of the 80-some Americans who are missing in the wake of the flood who have now come here to Nepal to try to find her parents.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Of course, our hope is that if they heard the alarms and the warnings, they either drove or they ran. And we are still waiting for that answer.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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[20:22:05]
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COOPER: When you're walking in this mud and kind of liquid cement, your feet just sink down into it. If you look at this, there are rocks, there are boulders. It is all manner of debris -- vehicles, cars, everything that was swept from up river.
And when you walk through this, you sink, you know, a foot or foot or two feet into it. It is hard to imagine this liquid cement with the force and the speed that it was coming down this valley, hitting this area.
But you don t have to imagine it. You can just look.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, we do not know how many people were in that town when the flood wiped out that whole marketplace area.
According to Nepali and Chinese authorities, the death toll is approaching a thousand. That number certainly will change in the hours ahead. It will almost certainly rise.
In just the last hour, we learned that authorities have recovered the bodies of 24 people from a single house. The local police superintendent has said that he expects to find more.
At the top of the broadcast, we showed you a mass grave that is being dug. CNN's Hanako Montgomery is at that site, and she joins me now.
Hanako, what's the situation there? What are you seeing?
HANAKO MONTGOMERY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Anderson, as you mentioned, I am currently in Bharatpur and just behind me, you can actually see where the mountains begin. And 60 miles north of here are the worst hit areas that you visited on Monday, Anderson.
And the river that connects these mountains, we are told by authorities, has basically flooded down here and it has brought hundreds of bodies downstream to the valley that we are currently in at the moment.
And authorities have been conducting search and recovery missions in the nearby river, where they ve been pulling out body after body.
On Monday, we visited a center where family members have been trying to identify whether their missing loved ones are among those who were recovered.
And, Anderson, I mean, the situation here, I mean, it is extremely grim. You can feel the air here is very heavy with grief. We spoke to one gentleman who said his son is a hydro power plant worker. He is currently missing and his son is married and has two children. He spoke to us about just how much this has emotionally affected his entire family. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UJWAL GHIMIRE, SEARCHING FOR MISSING SON (through translator): We could not find the dead body. My son's face did not match here. It is not here. He is not here.
Tomorrow, we are also going Nawalparasi and Nuwakot. His mother, Devenja's (ph) mother, she does not sleep at all throughout the night.
[20:25:10]
His wife is trying to commit suicide. She says she wants to die.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MONTGOMERY: Anderson, I know it's extremely hard for our audience to hear that, but this is the reality for thousands of Nepalis here, especially again, in the worst hit areas. I mean, this disaster has affected nearly everyone there. And as you mentioned, you know, we're at the mass grave site as well in Bharatpur.
Authorities have been digging and digging, trying to create more room for the hundreds of bodies that haven't been identified. And if none of their family members in the coming days or weeks comes to collect the remains, that is their final resting spot. And when we were visiting the site on Monday, Anderson, we saw some of the stretchers that they've been using to carry in those bodies.
And again, just extremely grim pictures that were seeing here in Bharatpur -- Anderson.
COOPER: Hanako Montgomery thank you for your extraordinary reporting and also your sensitivity in this incredible work.
Joining us now is Ben Ayers. He's a journalist with "Outside Magazine" who's been based in Nepal for more than 20 years. He's also co-host of the "Everest Live" podcast. Also joining us, journalist and author Jon Krakauer, whose incredible book "Into Thin Air" was an extraordinary account of a natural and human disaster in the Himalayas and a climb up Mount Everest. He's also the board chair of the American-Himalayan Foundation.
You're in touch, first of all, Ben, just we haven't talked for a couple of days. I know you're in touch with many first responders and outfitters helping the recovery efforts here. I ran into a friend of yours just yesterday, a drone operator. What's the latest you're hearing from them? And your take on what you are seeing on this, almost one week?
BEN AYERS, JOURNALIST WITH "OUTSIDE MAGAZINE": Yes, I think you know, everyone that I'm in touch with and have been speaking with from the Prime Minister's office to people on the ground, I think everybody is looking at the sort of sad and brutal ending to the rescue phase.
And now the reality that, you know, were moving into the recovery phase and the rebuilding and the reconstruction and, that's a much, much steeper mountain to climb.
I think everybody initially was very, you know, you don't want to say excited to be a part of it, but there was a great coming together of a lot of national talent organized by the government to have this huge response with over 21,000 people responding to this.
But now as hope becomes, you know, thinner and thinner, people are facing the much, much more difficult task of rebuilding. And then also of grieving and moving forward with their lives.
COOPER: And Jon, we were talking with Priya, one of the many remarkable helicopter pilots here, operating these incredibly narrow and steep canyons. How different and more difficult is operating those locations compared to places like Everest or other big peaks and a lot of these chopper pilots are also operating there as well?
JON KRAKAUER, AUTHOR "INTO THIN AIR": It's very different in the high- altitude peaks have their own risks, but this seems much more dangerous. I mean, just the traffic that pilot talked, you know, all these helicopters landing at the same place. And this really narrow canyon, trying to keep track of that and landing in these difficult places. This is incredibly difficult and dangerous operation they're doing. It's really commendable. I mean, it's, it's so much more complicated than, you know, rescuing climbers from Everest even, or, you know, those ten climbers who died in an avalanche on Broad Peak.
This is by an order of magnitude, orders of magnitude more difficult. And, you know, unrewarding, probably.
COOPER: Also, Jon, I want to bring up what Ben was talking about. I want to ask both of you about this, because he was talking about sort of what comes next. And that's a thornier issue and a, and a difficult issue. I mean, these there's been a lot of reliance on hydropower. Do all those facilities get rebuilt? Do these communities get rebuilt, given the vulnerabilities, but also the reality of, you know, the population and the need for people to live places?
KRAKAUER: That's an unanswerable question. It's going to the next months and years are really going to be challenging. It needs the hydroelectric, I mean, they need hydroelectric power. It's one of the main natural resources. There's going to be great pressure to rebuild these. The risk isn't going away. However, there has to be calculated, you know, this new government that was elected last March that brought hope of the end of the vast corruption and transparency, you know, the Prime Minister Balen Shah, changed the view of the country for the first time in a long time.
There's hope that, you know, things have changed, you know, are changing. And if now his young administration is faced with this huge challenge that it has to meet for him to stay, remain in power and be doing the things he hopes and promised to do to clean up the country. So, there's a lot at stake here. The whole, you know, the government will fail if the response is not adequate. People will demand, that things get fixed. And it's going to be really hard to put things back the way they were.
[20:30:37]
COOPER: Ben --
AYERS: Yes, and to kind of, you know, follow up with that --
COOPER: -- you know, you raised this issue -- yes, go ahead.
AYERS: Sorry, Anderson. I was just going to follow up on that and say, you know --
COOPER: No, go ahead.
AYERS: -- this disaster was different than the 2015 earthquake and previous floods that we've seen where the federal government, the central government, played a much stronger role. And they didn't allow civil society to come in. They turned away, or they didn't turn away, but they certainly didn't mobilize a lot of international volunteers.
And right now, the public opinion about that is extremely positive because they were able to mount a much more efficient response. But as Jon said, you know, the rebuilding is going to be much, much more difficult. Nepal's lost about 800 megawatts of hydropower. And the people that I've talked to, including people that are a part of the prime minister's team are saying that this event has profoundly shifted how they see the future. They understand that, you know, Nepal has thousands, tens of thousands of glaciers, any one of which could contribute to this. And as we experience a warming climate, you know, the day that the glacier fell was the warmest day in the past three years on record.
So as things are warming, Nepal's realizing that this kind of event may be the future of the country. So they're thinking more about, do we have to resettle massive populations? It's a really, really complicated thing to wrestle with in a place where the terrain is so unstable, you know, and these young, young mountains. These are questions that many of us don't even think to think about, you know.
COOPER: Yes, and it's not really -- I mean, you can understand intellectually until you see these mountains and the communities at the base and these valleys in the river. It -- I mean, it is a very, very difficult problem to try to figure out.
Ben Ayers, appreciate it. Jon Krakauer as well.
Just ahead, my conversation with the daughter of two Americans who has come here to find them. Also, the story behind the rescue of that five-year-old girl found alive in the rubble days after the disaster. She has been reunited, thankfully, with her parents. And you'll hear from them in a moment.
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(Speaking Foreign Language)
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[20:37:09]
COOPER: Night has fallen here in Kathmandu, but for those searching for their missing loved ones, time has essentially stopped. Unable to get to the hardest hit areas to search, many friends and relatives come to the hospitals or morgues in Kathmandu. They post pictures of their loved ones, hoping that somebody somewhere will have some information.
Outside the morgue, officials have posted pictures of the dead. All through the night, family members come here using the lights from their phones to try to see if they can find their loved one. But the pictures are very gruesome, and they are very hard to identify. Men, women, children. It's hard for family members to find who they're looking for.
(END VIDEO CLIP) COOPER: Well, sometimes, though, thank goodness they do. Take a look. This is a video of a five-year-old girl being pulled alive from the rubble nearly 60 hours after her house was swept away during the flooding in the fall. She has since been reunited with her parents here and is recovering in a children's hospital not far from here.
Here's CNN's Will Ripley with this remarkable story of survival.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(Speaking Foreign Language)
WILL RIPLEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At first, rescuers thought the faint cries coming from beneath the wreckage might be a cat. But under all the mud and debris between two battered buildings, they found a little girl, alive. Five-year-old Manisha, trapped here in the ruins of flood-ravaged Timure, Nepal, for nearly 60 hours. They lay her on brightly colored blankets. Rescuers crowd around her.
And after nearly two and a half days trapped amid the destruction, they begin feeding her, one spoonful at a time.
LOK BAHADUR UCHAL MAGAR, FATHER OF RESCUED GIRL (through translation): Her face was not recognizable. She had injuries. Her condition was serious. Had multiple injuries and blood all around.
RIPLEY: What is it like as a father to look at a video like that and see your daughter in that condition?
L. UCHAL MAGAR (through translation): She's my child. That's all I have to say. I have no words.
RIPLEY (voice-over): And this is Manisha now. CNN exclusively obtained these first images of her at a children's hospital in Kathmandu, battered and bruised, but alive, and back with her mom and dad. They thought she was gone. But all that time, she was waiting for them to find her.
GITA UCHAL MAGAR, MOTHER OF RESCUED GIRL (through translation): She says to me, "The flood came and swept me away." She says, "I called for mommy and baba. Why didn't you come to save me?"
RIPLEY (voice-over): The flood came without warning. Manisha was eating breakfast. Her mom, Gita, was at work. Her dad, Lok, was in the vegetable garden.
[20:40:06]
RIPLEY: What did that feel like? What did that sound like when the water hit your house?
L. UCHAL MAGAR (through translation): At the time, there was no sound coming. All of a sudden, it came like a tsunami. Came from the top. As it was coming, we were able to save nothing. The difference was five seconds. I was running, and within two seconds, the house was toppled and was taken away. I very much tried to save my child, but I could not.
RIPLEY: So where did you end up after the flood? How were you rescued? And when did you reconnect with your wife first?
L. UCHAL MAGAR (through translation): After running from there, I had headed towards the jungle already. I met my wife around Tupi (ph). After running up to the forest, we met. Then my wife asked me, "Where is the child?" She started crying. She became unconscious for five, six minutes. She lost consciousness.
RIPLEY: Did you have any hope at that point that Manisha was alive?
L. UCHAL MAGAR (through translation): No. At the time, I did not feel that Manisha was alive.
RIPLEY (voice-over): They searched desperately hoping to find her body. All that time, Manisha was alive downstream.
RIPLEY: It's miraculous that given the force of that water that she was able to have a place where she could survive.
G. UCHAL MAGAR (through translation): It was miraculous. When the child was found, it felt like a miracle. I thought, there is a God.
RIPLEY (voice-over): But their house and everything they own is gone. Amid so much pain and loss here in Nepal, they know they're among the lucky ones.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: And Will Ripley joins us now. How is she doing?
RIPLEY (on-camera): She's good. You know, she's asking for her parents' cell phones so she can watch, you know, videos and play games, but the cell phone was lost in the flood. So she just, you know, she's got -- she really bruised up and banged up, obviously, but she's talking to her parents.
And it's hard to hear her mom, you know, say that she -- her daughter was in the rubble there asking for Mom and Dad, you know, where are you? And it's going to be hard for her. She's six, so she might be old enough to remember some of this.
COOPER: Yes, of course. You were here in the earthquake in 2015. What -- how is this different? How is this the same?
RIPLEY (on-camera): Yes, back in 2015, I remember people were so terrified here in Kathmandu, you know, because everybody was sleeping outside because there were aftershocks and people were afraid their houses were going to come in. The fear now is in the mountains. People are afraid to be anywhere because this flood hit areas that had never flooded before.
And so people are sleeping in the middle of the night and they get this text message saying there's a rumor of another flood. Everybody runs up to the top of the hill.
COOPER: Yes.
RIPLEY (on-camera): So people aren't sleeping. I met a, you know, girl that lost 17 family members, a guy that lost eight family members. They just -- the scale of the loss is --
COOPER: Yes.
RIPLEY (on-camera): -- something I've never experienced before.
COOPER: Yes. Will Ripley, thank you. Appreciate it as always.
Coming up, I'm going to speak to an Italian couple who narrowly survived the flood at the border. And when I say narrowly, we're talking about seconds and feet making the difference.
Also, my conversation with an American doctor searching for answers and trying to find her missing parents.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[20:46:22]
COOPER: There are houses that survived further up the hill. And if their owners people living there could get to them, they were the lucky ones. I saw a few dozen people here when I arrived, but it's pretty deserted and this area is cut off.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, for so many people here, time has been measured far differently than it was before the flood. It goes fastest maybe for the crews racing racing it to find survivors slowest and hardest for anyone with loved ones who's been unaccounted for since last Wednesday.
Among the missing are Ramesh and Neelam Sharma, Americans from New York. They were here on a religious pilgrimage with the tour group and were at the border area from Nepal to Tibet when the wall of water and ice and debris hit.
Last week, I spoke with her daughter, Dr. Radhika Sharma. She has since now traveled here to Nepal and is looking for any word on her parents.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER (voice-over): Last Wednesday morning, Ramesh Sharma and his wife, Neelam, New Yorkers, were getting ready to cross into Tibet on a Hindu pilgrimage with five other Americans, including Amita Amin and Tejal Patel. Their guide, Abhishek Singh (ph), called his wife in Kathmandu, saying they were about to go through immigration. A little more than 30 minutes later, this happened. The border crossing was obliterated. I spoke with the Sharma's daughter, Radhika, a doctor, and her brother, Akash, in North Carolina. She was already planning to come to Kathmandu.
DR. RADHIKA SHARMA, PARENTS MISSING IN NEPAL: My plan is to first go to the embassies, talk to them, and then from there maybe go to the different hospitals.
COOPER (voice-over): She arrived Sunday with her husband, Pujan (ph). A family friend brought them to the small upstairs office of Trekking Planner, the tour company that organized her parents' visit.
COOPER: How are you holding up?
SHARMA: I've had ups and downs. Kind of just fluctuates, honestly. It is nice to be here with people who are like also directly affected --
COOPER: Yes.
SHARMA: -- by this.
COOPER (voice-over): Dikshya Lamichhane runs the company.
DIKSHYA LAMICHHANE, HUSBAND MISSING IN NEPAL : So he is my husband.
COOPER (voice-over): Her husband, Abhishek, was Radhika's parents' guide. He and two other guides are also missing.
LAMICHHANE: He got a tattoo.
COOPER: Wow, it's an amazing tattoo.
LAMICHHANE: His whole back, one leg, he's a Chelsea fan. I have given all the information about him because he got a lot of tattoos, so it will be very easy to identify him. We have been to everywhere to check the bodies because --
COOPER: You've been to the hospital in the morning?
LAMICHHANE: Yes.
COOPER: You're hopeful, but you also --
LAMICHHANE: Yes, still checking every place.
SHARMA: Of course, our hope is that if they heard the alarms and the warnings, they either drove or they ran. And we're still waiting for that answer.
COOPER (voice-over): On the street outside, a Hindu procession passes by. Radhika and Pujan (ph) will head to the embassy and then hospitals and the morgue.
COOPER: We're saying that inside, that part of being here, it helps because there's others who are in the same situation. SHARMA: Yes. Because then I know I'm not going through this by myself. There are other people who are affected and we will all get through it together. It's like the --
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well, I'm joined now by Valentina Piccinini, who was on a bus with her partner near the Nepal-China border when the flood hit, narrowly escaping with their lives. Thank you so much for being with us.
VALENTINA PICCININI, SURVIVED NEPAL FLASH FLOOD: Thank you.
[20:50:07]
COOPER: How are you doing at this -- I mean, it's got to be surreal.
PICCININI: I mean, there are just five days passed by for everybody. I think everything is just finished, no. You're alive and you survived. It's not like this. I mean, for us, it's a super roller coaster.
COOPER: Yes.
PICCININI: It was all five days really strong emotionally. As soon as the survivor step, put off the new real life, it's beginning. So, for us, it's not finished anything. For us, it's just the beginning.
COOPER: And it feels that way. It feels like a new life.
PICCININI: Yes. Who are you up to? No, I mean, for sure, it's life will never be the same. We decided to stay here for other days just to try to feel our body and our heart with the energy of Nepali people to be able to come back home.
COOPER: You have never been here before. This was your first time.
PICCININI: No. So it was my first time. Only less than 48 hours here in Kathmandu. Just around nearby Pashupatinath Temple and that's the day after. We left for this trekking. So, first great experience. I mean, but for sure, I'm -- I think I will be back here for people, for landscape for sure but for people first.
But, you know, we need time to process. Everything happens --
COOPER: And you are creating a foundation. You want to fundraise for -- what is it for?
PICCININI: Yes, we was able to find this amazing guy. He's an Italian guy. He's living in Nepal and Italy as well. He has an association who work here in Nepal more than -- since than 20 years. SOS Nepal, but if you can go to Instagram pages, both me and Stefano (ph), you will find all the details.
For us, it's very precious to share to be able to get as much as we can because it's the only way we can help here right now. It's a kind of way to give back our miracle to the people who really helped us. Pash (ph) is our guide. He helped me really a lot.
COOPER: You credit your guide with saving your life.
PICCININI: Basically, yes.
COOPER: How?
PICCININI: Because I was remained alone but everybody already knows the story because I turned left and not right.
COOPER: And that was the difference.
PICCININI: It was the -- that for me, it was a really big difference because I was completely alone. Nobody from my group nearby me. Only Nepali people. I don't know. Whatever. Just a survivor mode. So I start to to run with the people over there. But no phones, no connection and no way to to call them and to say, hello, I'm alive.
COOPER: Had you turned left, had you turned right, you saw people.
PICCININI: I don't know anybody. OK, I didn't saw -- I didn't see anybody. That's the reason why. It was a moment that OK, nobody's around me. Where I need to go but you have to be fast because everything is coming towards me honestly. And so that, OK, survival mode left.
I don't know why.
COOPER: Yes.
PICCININI: I saw an ant and I follow simply this hand and I start to run. I don't know why. Something crashed --
COOPER: And you sheltered overnight with people from Nepal.
PICCININI: Yes, we were the only European people over there. We were eight from all the other -- from our group.
COOPER: Right. We're showing pictures of that.
PICCININI: Yes, it was a super, super night. I mean, it was maybe the strongest first lesson Nepali people gave to us because they lost -- really they lost everything.
COOPER: What was the lesson?
PICCININI: I mean, we have a home to be back. We have family to be back. They lost everything and we were all shocked and they were laughing and they were all friends survived together to the disaster. They light fire, they share with us -- food, songs, stories.
I mean, we were not able to understand each other because we just spoke English.
COOPER: Yes.
PICCININI: Their English is not so fun.
COOPER: It seems like you understand them pretty well though.
PICCININI: But, I mean, it's the heart language.
COOPER: Yes.
PICCININI: Nothing matters the most. That night was a super night. We would try to sleep but it was impossible because of the noise of the rumors outside.
COOPER: It's a beautiful way of saying though. It's the heart language.
PICCININI: Heart language. Nothing -- heart and highest contact was something that it was maybe second happy place where I need -- where I go when I think about the day of the disaster. First is when I'll be back with the group, and second is, Nepali people for sure.
COOPER: Well, Valentina, thank you so much for being with us.
PICCININI: Thank you so much.
COOPER: Really an honor.
PICCININI: Thank you.
COOPER: Coming up, I'm going to show you what is left from a once bustling market down here. Now, mostly buried under flood debris. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:58:30]
COOPER: Yesterday I was able to visit a town that is very remote and was once a thriving marketplace. It's called Syabru Besi and what took generations to build in this town took seconds to erase. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: This is the town of Syabru Besi or what's left of the town I should say. This is all that's left of the once bustling market district in the town. All of this area and all the way down to the river down this hill would have been businesses and homes. People lived here.
There was a lot of commerce. The border with Tibet is just about 18 miles from here and there was a very important road from that border area all the way down to Kathmandu that ran through this town but that road now is wiped out. It's stunning to see it up close.
I don't even think the camera can really capture just the scale of this. It looks probably just on camera like some dirt field but this isn't -- you know we talk about water and this flood that came down -- and yes, there was a lot of water in it, but look this is -- there's rocks in this. There was boulders.
There's vehicles everything that the sludge picked up from further upstream, it's like concrete essentially. And it just covers everything. If you walk out into this area, you can tell by my shoes, you'll just sink in it. It's like concrete quicksand.
This was once a destination spot for Hindus and Buddhists on religious pilgrimages. They would come here also trekkers from all over the world. There's 15 Australian trekkers who are have been reported missing in this area as well as dozens of other foreigners. It's not clear how many people died here in this town.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: That's just one town in the community all along that river.
That's it for us. Thanks for watching. The news continues. The Source with Kaitlan Collins starts now.
