The River Took It All: Aerial Visuals From Nepal Show Scale Of Catastrophe | NDTV Exclusive

The mud brought in by the catastrophic flood in Nepal is hardening already. Aerial visuals show it has covered entire population centres, places that had people last week but now look like bare rock faces or rock-strewn riverfronts. As NDTV flew over the region, the ex-army officer flying the chopper identified where settlements stood until a week ago.

The deadly wall of water on August 26 took with it many lives, more than 1,000 at last count as of September 1. Those alive are now without livelihoods or homes. Life, as they knew it, is buried under that hardening mud. These were the scenes when NDTV flew over and walked Ground Zero of the devastation in the Trishuli river valley, which saw a bulk of the devastation.

Trishuli river valley in Nepal as seen from a helicopter on Tuesday, September 1.

Visuals from the helicopter showed the narrow gorges now flattened and widened into valley-like spreads, with rocks, debris, mud, and bodies strewn across them. Another chopper passed by the one we were on. It was carrying bodies, we were told.

On the ground, the body of a child, not more than six years old, was being pulled out of the ruins of a home in a town on the banks of the Trishuli. Silence amid the debris spoke to the extent of death and devastation that's becoming clearer by the hour. The stench carried it, too, as bodies remain buried or unrecovered yet, of people and of their livestock.

From the chopper, a defining moment was seeing the place where the Gyirong border port between Nepal and Tibet (China) stood. It's now a flat spot where the river Lhende Khola, into which a glacial avalanche-cum-landslide fell and triggered the flood, meets the Bhote Koshi, the river which further meets the Trishuli. A large number of Hindu pilgrims, including from India, were at the spot when the horror unfolded, on camera. Footage showed gigantic waves of rock, ice and water simply made it vanish - perhaps the most horrifying visual on the scale of the tragedy.

Around 70 km downstream in Devighat in Nuwakot district - the flood's most impactful stream ran about 100 km - NDTV met one of the people who managed to save their family, but lost everything that ran their lives.

"We were all right here, my wife, our three kids and I," Deepak Tamang, a restaurant owner, said on Monday, sitting next to a devastated building that housed his business. "We were saved by, say, two minutes. We could have died in that instant," he said.

He described that instant: "We heard loud sounds of water thudding in. We first made our children run away from this place. We had to react quickly, too, so we left the shop immediately after, taking nothing with us. We just could not save anything, only ourselves."

Watch below: How a man saved his family, lost his shop and home

He gestured towards a visibly vacant space some feet away, and said, "That was our house. Now we have nothing. We will have to find some kind of livelihood all over again."

He added, "We are wondering where we can go, whether we get any food somewhere, where we can even sit. That's all that I am thinking now."

Near Devighat, there were remains of a solar power plant that told a story on their own too. Located near the Trishuli river that broke its banks, it's just one of several power plants that have been wiped out. Thick mud covers the hundreds of solar panels that have been obliterated.

This was just one example of a power plant - a relatively small one - of how the raging waters of the Trishuli impacted electricity-generation infrastructure.

Further north, closer to the avalanche site, rescue efforts are on at the run-of-the-river hydel power projects. Earth-moving machines were digging through the rubble to find signs of life, or in most cases at least remains that could be handed over to families if possible.

Indian, Nepali and Chinese tunnelling experts have been deployed across the region as hundreds are still feared trapped.

The flash flood that ran through three rivers directly affected at least 12 power-generation facilities, knocking out nearly 430 megawatts of capacity. The damage has shrunk Nepal's export surplus but has not yet made Nepal a net importer of power. The cost, however, to rebuild infrastructure from homes to roads to bridges and power plants is staggering.

"The next phase is early recovery, temporary shelter, temporary cash for work, among other things. That has to be a priority," Nepal Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has said. But the daunting task, he said, is over the medium term. "Reconstruction is what we are focused on after that."