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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
The Catastrophic Flooding That Devastated Nepal Came On A Clear Day; Scientists Don't Know For Certain Yet, But Early Evidence Points To A Bedrock Failure That Led To A Glacier Collapse; When The Flood Hit, A Group From The Isha Foundation Spiritual Center, With A Campus In Tennessee, Were On Their Way Back From A Trip To Mount Kailash. Aired 9-10p ET
Aired September 07, 2026 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[21:00:00]
ELEX MICHAELSON, CNN HOST: We're closely following, as Hurricane Lowell's path shifts closer to Hawaii, increasing the danger, its track, has shifted about 175 miles east, placing Kaua`i and Ni`ihau under a rare hurricane warning. It's currently a Category Two hurricane with winds of 110 miles per hour. Heavy rain has already flooded roads on O`ahu, where a tropical storm warning is now in effect. But all the islands will be soaked as the storm approaches. That's a live look right now.
Thanks for joining us on CNN Newsroom. I'll be back for The Story Is at midnight Eastern. Anderson Cooper and "The Whole Story" starts right now.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Welcome to "The Whole Story". I'm Anderson Cooper reporting from Kathmandu, a capital in a country, Nepal, that is reeling from a devastating and explosive flood that hit this region nearly two weeks ago. The scale of loss and damage here is staggering, a massive surge of water and boulders and mud and debris that wiped out buildings and entire villages along the flood route. The death toll continues to climb, and so many are still missing.
In this next hour, I'll bring you the stories of families hoping to find their loved ones, as well as those who managed to survive the deadly event. I'll also show you how the flood unfolded and why scientists and experts believe it was so powerful.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh my God! Oh my God!
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COOPER (voice-over): The catastrophic flooding that devastated Nepal came on a clear day.
BEN AYERS, JOURNALIST BASED IN NEPAL (on camera): It was sunny, and nobody had any idea what was coming down the river towards them. COOPER (voice-over): What was coming, materialized in north-central Nepal near the border with China, seemingly out of nowhere.
DR. AUSTIN LORD, SENIOR FELLOW, ENERGY, WATER SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAM, STIMSON (on camera): The scientific consensus, as I understand it, there was a fracture of a massive volume on the north side of Langtang Lirung.
AYERS (on camera): It's one of the most isolated corners of the Himalayas. It's not something that people would have had an eye on to see this coming.
COOPER (voice-over): Scientists don't know for certain yet, but early evidence points to a bedrock failure that led to a glacier collapse. This shows the glacier just after it collapsed, and the landslides of rubble and ice, as they tore down the mountain toward the valley, kicking up clouds of ice and debris. This is what the mountain looked like shortly after the disaster. It's missing an enormous chunk, around a half mile wide and nearly a mile long.
AYERS (on camera): Imagine if three blocks of Manhattan fell off the side of a mountain and went 5,000 feet down into a river valley. Imagine the force that that would create, and it was hundreds of millions of tons of ice and rock fell thousands and thousands of feet down into the river valley with the force of multiple nuclear explosions.
DR. ALTON BYERS, UCB INSTITUTE ARCTIC AND ALPINE RESEARCH (on camera): As masses of material descend, the ice melts because of friction with the air. It's beginning to form this hyper-concentrated slurry glacier flood. It's liquid concrete, just slurry moving down.
LORD (on camera): It then hit the river and it started basically bulking or pushing the river in front of it. This is sort of similar to driving a snow plow down a river, where the whole thing is just moving in front in a constrained deep valley gorge.
COOPER (voice-over): It moved about 120 miles per hour along the Lende River that divides Nepal and China, before obliterating the Gyirong port of entry. At Gyirong was this multi-storey administration building on the Chinese side. The Friendship Bridge connected it with Nepal. Both were destroyed. Anjana Raja and her husband, both American, were there waiting to approach the border.
ANJANA RAJA, SURVIVOR (on camera): I saw something coming really brown up there, going up like 60 to 70 feet, something coming brown our way. The way it came, it came just like a tsunami. It just took the busses, the lands, houses, people, everything. We saw people just getting sucked in the water. It was so traumatizing to see that. People were screaming.
COOPER (voice-over): Nearby, a series of hydropower projects.
LORD (on camera): The Rasuwagadhi hydropower project, which is right there, just a couple of hundred meters south of the border, the initial dam and the intake for the tunnels just gone as well. It took out several other hydropower projects along the course.
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COOPER (on camera): Further down the valley, entire towns were wiped out, the current strong enough to carry boulders. 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.
COOPER (voice-over): In the town of Bidur, this home withstood the raging waters, temporarily trapping residents who survived. This nearby bridge was wiped out. So, it was this one, and this one.
COOPER (on camera): You can see how high the river was at its peak, all the dirt and the mud. That line is where the river reached.
COOPER (voice-over): The flood zone is in an area that's sacred to Hindus and Buddhists, attracting tourists and religious pilgrims.
HANAKO MONTGOMERY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (on camera): Mount Kailash is a pilgrimage site for Hindus and Buddhists, and it's believed that some of the religion's holy gods live on the top of that mountain, and you have people from the United States, from Canada, from Australia, from other parts of Nepal, actually go visit the mountain and pay their respects.
COOPER (voice-over): When the flood hit, a group from the Isha Foundation Spiritual Center, with a campus in Tennessee, were on their way back from a trip to Mount Kailash. 22 Americans were in the group. This is their founder.
SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV, SPIRITUAL LEADER (on camera): We received a message from the group leader. They have arrived at the immigration. Literally, the entire group was there in the building.
COOPER (voice-over): The group was at the same border crossing as Anjana Raja and her husband.
ANJANA RAJA, SURVIVOR (on camera): It was just a span of 30 minutes. In 30 minutes, everything was swept and gone. There were dead bodies within sight, bodies where there were only half bodies, just hands, just legs, just face, just head, bodies like that lying around.
PATTABIRAMAN VENKATESAN, SURVIVOR (on camera): This thing was less than 30 feet away from us. It could have easily been us.
COOPER (voice-over): They survived because their bus was parked on an incline, and they were able to quickly run to higher ground.
VENKATESAN (on camera): I've been asking myself, why me? Why was I saved? And so many people had to go.
COOPER (voice-over): Survival on that day depended often on luck and split seconds. This woman narrowly escaped with two children. LORD (on camera): The overall extreme impacts are seeing very intense
impacts of this event, are extended over a course of almost 100 kilometers.
COOPER (voice-over): That's about 60 miles of destruction, reaching as far as the central Nepali city of Devighat.
AYERS (on camera): Nepal has set up flood warning systems across the country in areas where people know this danger might happen. Most of those flood warning systems are either monitoring river levels, or they're looking at these glacial lakes to prevent these glacial lake outburst floods. For an event of this size and scale, just monitoring the river isn't going to tell you that there is 100-foot wall of water moving at over 100 miles an hour. There just is no way, given the current infrastructure, to predict this.
COOPER (voice-over): This disaster may eventually prompt the development of new warning systems, but the first focus on the ground is search and rescue.
DR. RADHIKA SHARMA, PARENTS MISSING IN NEPAL (on camera): 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.
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COOPER (voice-over): As this giant tsunami of liquid cement obliterated towns, the race against the clock began. Rescuers say the first 72 hours are critical.
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (on camera): It's everything. There is that golden window of time when you can try to reach people.
COOPER (voice-over): It's often the difference between rescue and recovery. Finding survivors quickly depends on getting to remote communities along the river, but with the roads wiped out, many towns were cut off.
AYERS (on camera): Nepal's geography is impossible on the best of days. When you get an event like this thrown into the mix, it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to even reach the areas that were affected by this flood.
COOPER (voice-over): Some 30 highway bridges were also destroyed. The fastest and, in many cases, only way to reach survivors was by air.
MAJOR GENERAL ANUP JUNG THAPA, DIRECTOR GENERAL OF MILITARY OPERATIONS, NEPALI ARMY (on camera): It's very restrictive terrain. It's almost linear flying.
COOPER (voice-over): Major General Anup Jung Thapa is in charge of the military response. He spoke with CNN's Hanako Montgomery.
THAPA (on camera): I must say, the airspace deconfliction piece itself is a feat in professionalism, and at peak on the day, I believe it was the third or fourth day, the peak was 21 helicopters flying like fireflies.
CAPTAIN PRIYA ADHIKARI, NEPAL'S FIRST AND ONLY FEMALE HELICOPTER CAPTAIN (on camera): Whoever was found alive was taken out immediately on first and second day.
COOPER (voice-over): Priya Adhikari is Nepal's first and only female helicopter captain. The first six days of the disaster, she flew about 100 rescue missions. She recorded this video from her helicopter.
COOPER (on camera): The valley --
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yeah.
COOPER (on camera): -- is so close --
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yes.
COOPER (on camera): -- and you are flying --
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yes.
COOPER (on camera): -- through this --
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yes.
COOPER (on camera): -- it's extraordinary.
ADHIKARI (on camera): Just imagine 20 helicopters flying on bad weather --
COOPER (on camera): Yeah.
ADHIKARI (on camera): -- yet, 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 doing where. And we going to same place, evacuating from the same place, like five or six helicopters landing. So, we need to talk with each other so frequently.
COOPER (voice-over): Landing was also incredibly challenging.
ADHIKARI (on camera): Some of the places, you have to be very careful because the helicopter might sink in.
COOPER (on camera): It looks from the air, I imagine --
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yeah.
COOPER (on camera): -- to a -- it looks like -- ADHIKARI (on camera): Yes.
COOPER (on camera): -- oh, it is solid ground. It's concrete.
ADHIKARI (on camera): No, it's not concrete.
COOPER (on camera): You step in it and you sink.
ADHIKARI (on camera): Yes. I don't know from where it came. It was not like that before.
COOPER (voice-over): Captain Adhikari has flown rescue missions before. It's what she is trained for, but this one is different.
COOPER (on camera): I mean, you are touching down in people's lives and touching their lives in the most --
ADHIKARI (on camera): The smile I have is for the survivors. I don't know how they survived. Every time I go in land, I see people, and I'm like waving at them and saying like, you survived.
THAPA (on camera): In any disaster, the first and open order is save lives, get to where you can get to, and save as many lives as possible. We've pulled out over 4,000 by air, and all together with the other security agencies, we've pulled out about 12,000 plus people from that area. So, we started with rescues, and after about 24 hours, instead of sending out empty helicopters for rescue, we made sure that we sent out some relief.
[21:15:00]
COOPER (voice-over): Search and rescue dogs were being used to sniff out survivors underneath the rubble and sludge. In the areas that were still reachable by roadways, bulldozers and other heavy machinery were used to break through some of the debris to get to people like this woman covered in mud but alive.
25 miles of roads were wiped out in the flooding, and the thick liquid cement and debris made it difficult for rescuers to go anywhere on foot.
COOPER (on camera): We talk about water and this flood that came down, and yeah, there was a lot of water in it. But look, this is -- there is rocks in this, there was boulders, there was vehicles, everything that the sludge picked up from further upstream. When you're walking in this mud and kind of liquid cement, your feet just sink down into it.
AYERS (on camera): It scours and wipes the valley, and it leaves it coated in this heavy sediment that's almost impossible to dig out or to get through. And in terms of these rescue efforts, to be able to reach people in these pockets that may have some signs of survival, you can't carry an excavator under a helicopter. You have to have a road to get an excavator in. It's not the kind of thing that you can tackle with a shovel. COOPER (voice-over): Just 24 hours after the initial catastrophe, heavy rains posed a new threat, slowing down even stopping the search and rescue efforts.
THAPA (on camera): This is the monsoon season. So, these next two days, where there is going to be more rain as per the forecast, we have to be really, really careful.
COOPER (voice-over): Adding to the weather concerns, debris-filled lakes that formed in the mountains after the collapse.
WEIR (on camera): It creates these barrier lakes that just fill up with sediment and in water and pressure, and the worry is that those will release and send another pulse wave down valley to people who are trying to pick up the pieces.
BYERS (on camera): I thought it was quite dangerous. There are still a number of things that could happen that could promote secondary-type floods.
COOPER (voice-over): All this with fewer resources than most countries have. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, with about 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line.
AYERS (on camera): These disasters, the impact of them is amplified many times exponentially over what you would see with a similar event in an area with more resources, and this is especially true in those first the golden 48 or 72 hours, when rescue workers still have a chance of finding survivors and still have a chance of getting people out alive.
BYERS (on camera): With what they have, they've done a fantastic job in terms of rescue operations. But if your funds are limited, then to a certain extent, your effectiveness is going to be limited as well.
COOPER (voice-over): Communications are also difficult. The flash floods knocked out cell towers and fiber lines.
DR. SHARMA (on camera): The last time we heard from them was Wednesday morning at 08:00 a.m. They were at the border.
COOPER (voice-over): Dr. Radhika Sharma is waiting for word of her parents, Ramesh and Neelam. They were with a tour group on a religious pilgrimage at the border crossing around the time it was destroyed. They're among the estimated 85 Americans missing.
DR. SHARMA (on camera): I'll get some sleep tonight.
COOPER (voice-over): I met her and her husband in Kathmandu.
COOPER (on camera): First of all, how are you holding up?
DR. SHARMA (on camera): I've had ups and downs.
COOPER (voice-over): Their first stop, the tour company that organized her parents' trip, talking to the people who work here, hoping to piece together an exact timeline of where her parents were when the explosion of mud and water hit their location.
DR. SHARMA (on camera): 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 (on camera): And what do you do next?
DR. SHARMA (on camera): My responsibility is to talk to all the hospitals, leave my DNA sample. If I can reach out to somebody, maybe in like the police or the military, that's another avenue that I would love to explore, just so that I know that I -- I'm looking for answers.
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So, that's kind of the plan right now. I don't know what answers I will find. But that`s the best way that I can go about this. I think I've just learned in like a disaster like this, it's really the community coming together is where I feel like a lot of the bulk of that help comes. I know I'm not going through this by myself. So, that gives me hope.
ADHIKARI (Interpreted) (on camera): Well, I wondered about Radhika's mom and dad.
COOPER (voice-over): It turns out, Priya Adhikari, the pilot we met earlier, tried looking for them as well.
ADHIKARI (Interpreted) (on camera): There are some people that touches your heart in a different way. I tried finding them, yes, but there is no sign of life.
COOPER (on camera): How do you go about that? I mean, how does anybody go about finding anybody?
ADHIKARI (on camera): I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. They're not my relatives, but the emotion that we carry and the area that we have been and the dead bodies you see from above.
COOPER (voice-over): Everyone involved in the search and rescue operation knows that time is of the essence.
Coming up, the search inside the tunnels for hundreds of hydropower plant workers missing since the flood.
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COOPER (voice-over): With each passing day, the number of dead and missing continues to grow. At this hospital in Kathmandu, families scan a list of survivors receiving treatment, desperate to find the name of their missing loved one. Those who found no answers add posters to a wall already crowded with faces, both young and old. Nearby, officials have already posted images of the dead outside a morgue.
COOPER (on camera): 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.
COOPER (voice-over): Identifying the dead, however, is not easy. Their faces are often disfigured by the flooding. Officials said they were collecting DNA to help with identification before preparing mass burials.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): You can see the stretchers here where they've been carrying in those remains, and we're told to wear a mask because even from where I'm standing, the smell of decaying bodies is pretty strong.
COOPER (voice-over): While the first 72 hours are critical to finding people alive, hope still remains for some 900 missing workers at hydropower projects along the flood route, including workers believed to be trapped inside tunnels that were buried in mud and debris.
On day six, we reached one of the sites near the Nuwakot district. Crews were still digging, trying to reach the tunnel at Upper Trishuli 3A.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): I think there are about 45 to 50 people inside the powerhouse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): That many, 45 to 50.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): Yeah, because there are the working teams inside the powerhouse.
COOPER (on camera): And they were here when the flood came.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): And the flood hit this area. They were inside, right? So, we are trying now to excavate all this along the way. And you can see the guys there, they are drilling there.
COOPER (on camera): But you haven't had signs of life.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): We have nothing yet.
COOPER (voice-over): This is just one of the roughly dozen hydropower projects in the flood zone that are being searched for survivors.
AYERS (on camera): Nepal is going through a hydropower boom. It hasn't been fully realized. There are hundreds of hydropower projects under construction in Nepal right now. That also made them particularly vulnerable to this flooding because there were open tunnels; that things were being built and they weren't properly constructed or ready to withstand something of this scale, if that was even possible. LORD (on camera): I've been saying for many years that hydropower projects need to take better account of seismic hazards and all sorts of other secondary hazards like landslides, like flooding, and then climate risks, especially in the mountain environment. In many watersheds across Nepal, hydropower development is being pursued in piecemeal, where it's just sort of a rush to build as much hydropower as they can. The planning for hydropower development is not as careful as it should be.
COOPER (voice-over): These tunnels can stretch for miles deep beneath the surface, some rescuers paddle into the tunnels by boat, where the water and mud make it too difficult to walk. Search teams that make it deeper inside have to crawl in their hands and knees to advance. In the places where they can't squeeze through the rock, they use drones equipped with thermal cameras to continue the search. Flashlights and headlamps are the only source of light in this unimaginable darkness.
[21:30:00]
COOPER (on camera): Arnold Dix is a disaster and tunnel rescue expert who is joining us from Australia. Can you just talk about what it's like to be trapped in a tunnel?
ARNOLD DIX, DISASTER AND TUNNEL RESCUE EXPERT (on camera): The blackness of being trapped in a tunnel is unlike anything you'll experience as a human being. When you're trapped in the underground and you're in complete black, you feel it, like you feel it on your eyes, and you get completely disoriented, and it's very stressful because your body knows something is wrong.
LORD (on camera): Some of them are large enough where you can drive two large trucks past each other. Some of them are very small. But one time, I was inside of a tunnel over a mile underground, inside of a powerhouse cavern. I was taking photographs of people doing construction work, it was the middle of the night, and the power went out. It was complete darkness, and I was inside this room with over 100 other people, and it was quiet, but it was extremely, extremely terrifying to be there, deep underground with no light at all. So, I can't imagine what it might feel like for people when the event hit. With the shaking that was reported, I'm wondering what the hell it is, and then being trapped for that long in a place like that is just absolutely terrifying.
COOPER (voice-over): Even in these conditions, workers can survive for a number of days if they have enough water and air.
DR. JENNIFER HORNEY, PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE (on camera): So, the hydroelectric facilities would have had emergency plans, and people have taken shelter in these tunnels before. And so, hopefully they're equipped with things like potable water and maybe something like a meal ready to eat that they can survive on for a period of time.
COOPER (on camera): Do you believe that there are people still alive in there? SHISIR KHANAL, NEPALI FOREIGN MINISTER (on camera): Based on the reports and the people who design these plants, they say that deep inside these tunnels there could be ear pockets. So, based on these sort of engineering analysis, we are very hopeful that there could be many people still alive.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (on camera): I think the first 48 hours is the most crucial, but there have been miracles, and are we expecting miracles everywhere?
COOPER (voice-over): Back at Trishuli 3A, rescue teams were finally able to drill a hole and rappel into the main part of the tunnel, which was blocked by rocks and debris. They used explosives and shovels to go even deeper. On the ninth day after the collapse, they heard a voice. They found 30-year-old mechanical foreman Sanjay Shah alive, and were pulling him out of the tunnel when they heard another voice. 45-year-old Kabir Maharjan was also found and rescued. Sanjay Shah didn't realize how long he'd been trapped for, and he doesn't know how many others are still alive.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (Interpreted) (on camera): How many are there inside? Please tell me.
SANJAY SHAH, SURVIVOR (Interpreted) (on camera): I was working inside the control room as an operator. In other times, there would be four to five only, but this time there were 40-45. My responsibility was to save everyone's life. After the accident happened, I could not run by myself. I had to save everyone. In the process of saving everyone, I'm told that there was an accident in the big dam. And I asked everyone to escape outside. Doing so, I wasted time, and I could not get out. I got trapped.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (Interpreted) (on camera): Are there others in the powerhouse? Are there people there?
SHAH (Interpreted) (on camera): It could be. There are many in the tunnel who were unable to escape. The tunnel is long. The force of the water may have swept them away. The tunnel is really long.
COOPER (voice-over): Nepali officials hope for more miracles, but the families of those missing in the tunnels continue to wait for fathers, brothers, and sons who may never come home.
Nepal has a long history of climate-related disasters. Is a warming planet to blame? That's next.
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(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) AYERS (on camera): The river valley where the flood happened is
actually quite a diverse area. Tibetan Buddhists, they live in sort of stone homes. Many of them move to making money off of the trekking and tourism industries. As you move down the valley, you get into different indigenous or Hindu populations.
What we've been seeing now in recent years, as Nepal's economy has developed, local communities have started to settle on the flat land in the river basin, areas that are easy to build. Nepal is experiencing sort of this urbanization.
COOPER (voice-over): This is Langtang and many of its surrounding villages before the most recent disaster struck.
[21:40:00]
This is what it looked like roughly one year earlier. In July 2025, at least 11 people died in flash flooding, likely caused by a glacial lake outburst.
LORD (on camera): That was a surprise to researchers. No one saw an event at that scale. They thought that that could happen here, and it destroyed the same bridge that connects Nepal and China.
COOPER (voice-over): It took months for authorities to rebuild the roads and bridge at the same border crossing between Nepal and China that was slammed by the wall of mud and debris in the recent flooding.
BYERS (on camera): Well, you have to understand this is not something starting recently. It's extensively glaciated region.
COOPER (voice-over): Over the past century, glacial failures and other compounding hazards have posed a looming threat to the people in Nepal living in the so-called third pole. This mountainous region holds the largest volume of freshwater ice outside the North and South Poles.
LORD (on camera): People living in this area have been living with risks like this for centuries, not at this scale, but they've been living with the risk of floods, landslides, avalanches, inexplicable flow events.
COOPER (voice-over): Back in 2015, an earthquake triggered a historic landslide. An estimated 9,000 people were killed.
BYERS (on camera): The day of the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 that buried the village of Langtang was absolutely horrific.
LORD (on camera): The earth started shaking. Landscapes were coming everywhere.
COOPER (voice-over): Austin Lord was in Langtang and witnessed the quake firsthand.
LORD (on camera): Scientists have calculated that it released over half the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It's shocking to walk through something like that, even at that scale. And what we're looking at here with this disaster is just something of a whole other magnitude.
COOPER (voice-over): Many climate experts believe the magnitude of the various disasters in this region are being supercharged by climate change that has been rapidly heating the planet.
BYERS (on camera): The planet has warmed, and as the planet has warmed, mountains have warmed as well, and we first became aware of it in such things as receding glaciers, and the formation of glacial lakes and glacial lake outburst floods, and now it seems to manifest more and more in events related to changing permafrost, which no longer has that capacity to hold up rocks and ice and glaciers. They have lost their resistance to gravity. Add to that, melting. So, all these things add up to a greater instability of high altitude rock, bed rock, and ice. So, then all it takes is a trigger, and then you get the onset of what we saw last week, which was a series of cascading events.
AYERS (on camera): In my mind, this event is undeniably tied to climate change. In the 28 years that I've lived in Nepal, the mountains look completely different. A recent study has come out that shows that Nepal's glaciers are receding at twice the rate they were 20 years ago. That's something I've seen with my own eyes, and it's undeniable.
WEIR (on camera): The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is the top scientists from around the world, in 2023, they wrote specifically, every increment of warming will multiply and intensify future hazards from cryosphere regions, the frozen places of our planet. Floods, landslides, freshwater shortages from glacial retreat, and snow loss pose a serious threat to mountain regions across the world, and they're very hesitant to say we told you so. But I can say they told us so. I think the thing that should get people's attention is this is not a Himalaya story. Any town now, whether it's South American towns in the Andes, it's Italian ski towns up into the Alps, it's the Rocky Mountains, any of these communities now who are under frozen landscapes have to be thinking about their existence in a whole new way.
COOPER (voice-over): Nepali government officials have made clear they believe the threat their country is facing is global, and that the solutions must be global as well.
KHANAL (on camera): This should be seen from the perspective of justice and fairness. How fair is it for Nepali people and people of Himalayas to bear the burden of the climate change where we have had very little contribution to it? So, we are asking that question.
COOPER (on camera): Do you see this as a direct result of climate change?
KHANAL (on camera): Absolutely.
COOPER (on camera): No question.
KHANAL (on camera): There is no question that there is evidence.
[21:45:00]
AYERS (on camera): Already, so many people in Nepal are talking about climate justice. They feel like the warming climate, that climate change is contributing to these types of events, and they're paying a disproportionate price for them. The average Nepali puts out about four tenths of a ton of carbon into the atmosphere per year, whereas the average American, like me, puts in 14 tons. It's understandable that they are crying out for climate justice. I think other countries will join this cry. Whether or not they have the political muscle and ability to actually achieve that justice, remains to be seen.
COOPER (voice-over): It's impossible to say when the next climate disaster will hit Nepal, but many experts say it is inevitable. So, how does this country rebuild, knowing this could all happen again?
COOPER (on camera): In town after town along this river, the scenes are, in many ways, the same. Devastation is complete. This is formerly the Trishuli market. This is what remains. Most of this building completely destroyed. This one as well, there, there, these, that, and in many of these empty spaces, there were once buildings. Helicopters pass every few minutes, moving personnel, supplies, in some cases, bodies. Residents, people from other areas have been coming down here throughout the day, taking pictures, staring, trying to comprehend what has happened and what happens now.
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[21:50:00]
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COOPER (voice-over): After the massive tsunami of liquid cement and debris tore through this valley, Nepal is saying goodbye. In Nuwakot, the family of 32-year-old Prabita Roila carried her body through fields toward the river for her cremation ceremony. She was a school teacher and was the only member of her family who has been found. Seven more remain missing.
In the face of so much loss, there have been a few rays of hope. In Timure, along the border of Nepal and Tibet, rescue workers digging through debris thought they heard a cat. It was a five-year-old girl, Manisha Magar, who'd been trapped in the ruins for nearly 60 hours.
LOK BAHADUR UCHAI MAGAR, MANISHA'S FATHER (Interpreted) (on camera): Her face was not recognizable. She had injuries. Her condition was serious, had multiple injuries and blood all around.
COOPER (voice-over): Her father told CNN's Will Ripley, Manisha was eating breakfast when the flood hit. Her mother Geeta was at work. He was in the vegetable garden.
MAGAR (Interpreted) (on camera): There was no sound coming. All of a sudden, it came like a tsunami. The difference was five seconds. I very much tried to save my child, but I could not.
COOPER (voice-over): He ran for the jungle and found his wife Geeta along the way. Neither of them believed their daughter could still be alive. She was found nearly two and a half miles downstream and had been alone for two and a half days.
GEETA, WIFE OF LOK BAHADUR UCHAI MAGAR (Interpreted) (on camera): She says, I called mommy and baba. Why didn`t you come to save me? It was miraculous.
COOPER (voice-over): The little girl was finally reunited with her parents, and is still recovering in hospital.
Another miracle emerged from the mud in Nepal's Rasuwa district. Matti Maya Tamang had scoured shelter searching for her two young sons. She found her younger son, but her eight-year-old boy was still missing. Then she called a reporter covering the search and heard that her older son Zoyal had also survived. He was injured with a broken leg, but alive and recovering in a Kathmandu hospital. Zoyal survived by fleeing from school. He ran into the forest and scaled the tops of trees to escape the raging currents. His mother was able to speak to him by phone. She later took him home from the hospital.
MATTI MAYA TAMANG, MOTHER OF SURVIVOR ZOYAL (Interpreted) (on camera): Babu, how are you feeling now?
ZOYAL, SON OF MATTI MAYA TAMANG (Interpreted) (voice-over): I'm OK.
TAMANG (Interpreted) (on camera): What should I being you? What do you feel like eating? I'm coming to see you.
COOPER (voice-over): And in the Trishuli valley, another narrow escape, all because one brave man made a decision in time.
CHHIRING TAMANG, BUS DRIVER (Interpreted) (on camera): Namaste. My name is Chhiring Tamang.
COOPER (voice-over): Chhiring Tamang, a bus driver, had about 50 children on board when floodwaters came. He got them across a bridge just before it was washed away.
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TAMANG, (Interpreted) (on camera): Two minutes after I crossed the bridge, I saw the flood. The students inside shouted and fainted inside. One of them fell down and became unconscious. They shouted fast, fast, let's go fast.
COOPER (voice-over): He drove uphill with the water at his back.
TAMANG, (Interpreted) (on camera): I reached the higher ground. I have reached safety, and I felt at peace.
COOPER (on camera): Do you feel like a hero?
TAMANG, (Interpreted) (on camera): For me the sad thing is I have lost my own brother's son. I am very sad because of that. My brother's son was an employee at the same school. I am very sad at the death of my brother's son.
COOPER (voice-over): He says his nephew called him right before he crossed the bridge.
TAMANG, (Interpreted) (on camera): He phoned me, where are you uncle? The flood is coming in the river.
COOPER (voice-over): Nearly two weeks after the disaster, stories like Chhiring's, are playing out across the country, survival next to loss again and again. And while the loss of life is immeasurable, Nepal has also lost much more. The country's finance minister estimates rebuilding could cost as much as $5 billion, more than a 10th of Nepal's entire annual economic output. That's just the economic cost.
AYERS (on camera): We also have to factor in the emotional cost of the recovery of what this means to Nepal's communities, and this can have a tremendous shift even on the psychology of a community. How can you sleep at night in these same areas after this? There is bridges to build. There is roads to reconstruct. Unfortunately, this came just as Nepal's crops were ripening in the region. There is going to be massive food security issues.
COOPER (voice-over): Some of the damage may not become clear until long after the water is gone.
BYERS (on camera): Sanitary facilities have been destroyed. Water sources have been contaminated. Health facilities are no longer there, and these impacts of this, intestinal disease, food supply, these go on for the long term.
COOPER (voice-over): And recovery will depend on more than rebuilding what was lost. It will also mean bringing visitors back.
LORD (on camera): People interested in visiting Nepal should not shy away because of this disaster. In the mid to the long term, I know people in the Langtang valley will want tourists to come back to that area because it's a main source of livelihood for them.
COOPER (voice-over): Yet, moving forward doesn't mean forgetting what happened.
LORD (on camera): When the main impacts of the disaster recede and we get years down the line, there is this forgetting that happened that enables oftentimes making similar mistakes. So, we need to find a balance between we cannot forget. We need to learn the lessons that come from this disaster, but also enable people to move on. We need to remember that these people are not just victims. Don't just make their story just being about this disaster. My heart now is with all the people who are directly affected by this, people I know I haven't heard from, people who are still looking for loved ones, family members, people I know who are lucky to just to have survived.
AYERS (on camera): The life in Nepal is very different than what you see on the media coverage. You hear about Nepal when there is a massive tragedy, or when there is a huge line of people trying to get to the summit of Mount Everest. I think people sort of think that that encapsulates everything. But Nepal is a profoundly fascinating, colorful, wonderful, tragic place. It's a place where you will never run out of things to explore or learn or discover. Because things are a little closer to the bone there, people are much kinder. People depend on one another.
I don't think anybody knows if anyone is going to be willing to move back into the flood-affected areas. There is nothing that says this won't happen in 14 months from now. And I just really want to emphasize that these are the things Nepal is wrestling with. Is Nepal becoming unlivable? I personally want the answer to that to be no, because Nepal is a place that captured my heart. It sounds strange to generalize about a whole nation, but there is a certain magic to the way Nepal is as a people and as a country. That keeps people like me coming back, and that has captured the world's imagination for generations.
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