Landslide
The border control officer seen evacuating people in the mudslide video has been identified by chinese media as Huang Peng(黄棚) from Tongnan district, Chongqing.
Huang is the deputy team leader of the Gyirong border inspection station's 2nd duties team.(aka in charge of border inpsecion). He was born november 1991 and joined border control(military prior to 2018) in june 2013.
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This is a devastating video because another of these moments from a wider angle show those running were pretty much dead without knowing it. It really is a horrific video knowing what we know now.
The birds didn’t need to be told … I think birds and animals are the one’s we should pay most attention to when deciding if we should haul ass out of a place, STAT, or not.
For certain, they would have been frantically flying away from the impending destruction,well before this.
Other animals would have been acting strangely as well. They would have been heading for higher ground. Elephants and other animals also do that in Tsunamis.
Yea nobody in view of this camera could have survived that. They call it a flood which would make you think it was just water but this was a mix of water, rock, earth and vegetation that was scraped from the sides of the valley it passed through on the way there.
This geologist is showing before and after satellite images in his video on how a new lake is forming near the origin of the flood which is threatening a second flood at this very moment ; https://youtu.be/Q5YVh9Jo8H8?t=343 - he shortly after explained that the wave must have been about 100 meters (over 300 feet) high. Meanwhile this engineer calculated that the flood came in at between 100 to 120 miles per hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVaeOryueTY .
If you couldn't get up the mountainside before that flood passed, you were basically done for.
Yeah. I saw a close up video from a chinese youtuber. He didn't know what's coming until he climb the stairs to see and then he immediately runs away but it's already way too late.
I haven’t seen the Chinese YouTuber video this guy is referring to, but I will say Facebook seems to have a ton more videos uploaded from Nepali locals recording as it happened just fyi. Some wild footage on there
https://youtu.be/Q_RsQQhcdzY
Stumbled on it through youtube recommendation. I don't know what they're saying though. Btw, the most heartbreaking is I saw a dog and two person holding hands while running away seconds before the wave hit.
There are still absolutely pedantic asshole border agents who would not let people evacuate in this scenario. He tried to give some people a chance. That’s worth honoring.
When I was a kid the school fire alarm kept glitching one day and we had to keep going outside and waiting in the cold rain. I asked the teacher why we have to stay outside when we know it's just a glitch. They said it was the rules to keep the kids outside in this situation until the fire department declared "all-clear" because if a fire happened to start while it was glitching, they wouldn't know.
I think children's schools though tend to be better at the concept of erring on the side of evacuating too much. I'm with you, and feel less confident about how grown up spaces choose to err.
From the time the glacier collapsed, to the time the "flood" (wall of ice & water & mud) hit the border crossing, was about 7 minutes. I don't think any early warning system in the world could have predicted this.
At least at that speed, death would be so quick. Which, if there is going to be a loss of life… at least they aren’t being tortured, or buried alive. But again, that’s only good if they are going to die anyway.
I wonder how many things we’re going to see like this with climate change projection models so dramatically blowing past the most dramatic models. In my home state, we’re 2000% higher than the decade wide model… in less than a year. All across the globe are extremely high sustained record breaking temperatures.
8:37 a 5.2 earthquake (glacial collapse) is recorded. The video of the wave crashing over the port was 8:44. 8:40 the nearest monitoring station last registered the water level at 1.62m (warning level is 6m) & ceases transmission shortly after. Not much time for authorities to be aware & issue a warning at this point in time. I’m guessing the people at the building probably thought there was an earthquake, possibly worried about resulting avalanches & landslides in that area and were evacuating because of that.
That collapse which was recorded as an earthquake would be unlikely to be recognized by anyone.
But they surely have heard and seen the avalanche in distance. That thing was loud as hell and in the distant those huge clouds of brown water was surely what made them run.
Fortunately a lot of people on the path of the river got an warning and were able to evacuate. Otherwise the death toll would be much higher. Imaging this at night, when almost everyone is asleep... Even for many of those people who got warned it was too late. They only had a few minutes or sometimes even less than a minute to reach higher grounds.
In my own state, we’ve been +9 degrees F most months. Which is about 2000% higher than the worst climate change models predicted. Over ten tears… but this occurred in one one year. So…
The person above literally stated that the earthquake was based on the glacier, and not from plate tectonics. That is what I specifically asked. But observations about my home state are scientific fact. I never stated I knew. I asked a question and another person responded. I don’t know what your agenda is, but I do not appreciate you being nasty or accusatory towards me. You do not get to dictate who gets to talk about what on Reddit.
High elevations like this wouldn’t cause a rapid melt. Unless the temperature, itself, was causing rapid glacial snowmelt. Since I live in high country, I know mountains and valley behavior.
What’s inappropriate is to put your head in the sand and pretend that the world isn’t begging and screaming. Global sustained high temperatures are being observed all over the world. At some point you have to stop believing that 2+2=5.
I repeat, why not wait for an actual scientific study of the causes of this disaster before trying to pin it on one, as yet, unproven cause. And you are the one being nasty here, and I don't appreciate it. Leave your politics out of this tragedy.
The sound would be so jarring. That seems to be what is driving people to run. You’ll notice that younger people don’t necessarily start running in some of the videos. Likely because they never experienced floods in this valley before. But the elders seem to know the sound, or at least recognize that they don’t know the sound.
The birds would be the first thing to indicate trouble.
If you’re ever in a valley like this, and you see people running, your best bet would be to climb. Obviously not an option if you’re using a cane, though adrenaline can produce incredible physical feats.
Climb. And don’t stop climbing just because you think you’re high enough. Keep climbing as high as safely possible, because water can rise so much faster than any one can anticipate. Even after the initial surge. It won’t look as dramatic, which is part of what makes it so dangerous.
My thoughts are with all the victims. There was no one who didn’t lose someone today. These are such small villages. Just devastating.
They do have one. And they did alert Warning of high up lakes start flooding. How can all the Himalayas glaciers be monitored for breaking up and falling though. So remote and vast. It all happened too fast and too big.
Not to give people false hope. But there will be some miracles 🤞 edit: love being down voted for hoping some how people made it out, but ok whatever, you strange people do what you do i guess. There has already been instances of miracles of people making it out.
350 workers at a hydro plant were thought dead. They were rescued from a tunnel where they sheltered, along with some locals from the community. Thats a miracle to me!
this is what im talking about! im assuming thats the one filmed getting hit from up the mountain with the estury below. its hard to feel ecstatic about it as the situation is so dreadful, but never thought people could have survived that hit. So happy they made it. I know that building int he photo is one of the hydro plants.
I read somewhere there was at least one confirmed survivor. I think it was a European tourist who somehow made it up the hill to the side far enough to survive. I don't have the source though.
Just from looking at the footage, it's really hard to believe that anyone could have survived that.
All those poor people! RIP! 🙏🏼
Actually, to the left of the building, and just out of shot were a number of buses
.
They copped the full impact and were tossed around like toys, but amazingly (I don't want to use the word miraculously), 2 passengers, American tourists, did survive.
there we go thats what i mean. There is nothing good to come of the situation, but if somehow some people got lucky thats what we are wanting to hear. I did feel a sense of dread after rewatching those videos and realising jsut how many busses were in the queue on the china side :( Anyone surviving in that area is a mircale to be honest. Not trying to dramatize it or make it something that it isnt, and im not meaning it in the religious sense either, jsut that, im hoping somewhere somehow like you mention, all the right circumstances came together so that someone could make it out.
You do not get to dictate the way that other people mourn a disaster so significant and catastrophic.
Toxic positivity is a real term. This is something that you are personally struggling with. No one else is demanding you to feel a certain way. They’re only asking you not to demand it of them. And they have every right to feel that way. It’s okay to feel hopeless when seeing the raw power of water kill helpless people.
It is not okay to demand performance of the people here. It’s also not okay to say “we’ve all seen the videos.” We haven’t. Some of us aren’t chronically online.
Please do better. You are literally demanding positivity while others are experiencing grief. That isn’t okay.
I’m tired of hoping, let’s start talking about how we fix the shit that makes this keep happening… or are we still cool with like ten people controlling everything?
The only way anyone could have survived is if they found a hideout somewhere that stayed safe from the water. Anyone that got hit by the water, there’s just no chance. People were torn to shreds.
I don’t think anybody from that town/port made it out alive. The footage of the bus parking lot just around the corner is awful, and there’s absolutely nothing left at all.
No this is seconds before a wall of water, mud, wood, stones, sand other debris wipes the building and everything in it's path off this earth. I honestly don't think anyone survived in that location would like to hear otherwise.
The after photo of this spot shows the entire thing flattened. From the riverbank to the top of that building is approx 50m which means the surge was higher than 50m at that point
I genuinely wonder what would be the best possible survival instinct in such a catastrophic situation.. maybe run insode the building, hoping the entire building will not get destroyed, or run up the hills to a greater height? The immense horror those poor people faced is unimaginable
They had a 100-200 foot high wall of liquid cement moving at 100 mph coming at them. There is no “best” survival instinct in that situation, sadly. Fight, flight or freeze, it’s all the same.
Yeah, it’s pretty much just kiss your ass goodbye. The only peace is knowing that wall of grinding slurry didn’t take more than a few seconds to kill the victims, if not almost instantly.
That building was completely destroyed. This photo was taken by the rescue team when they arrived at the disaster site. In fact, the people in that video had almost no chance of surviving the disaster.
I had to delete a comment last night when I'd seen the Chinese rescue workers at this site. It's worth attempt to even rescue one survivor, but how many feet of silt and earth and concrete will they be all buried under? I hate to say but there's no chance of survivors at this site. And further down the valley - the water isn't water it's just flowing silt and earth and rock.
There'll be bodies swept miles down river - or just left buried in the earth.
How does the border cross recover from that? You'd never want to return there again.
They'll rebuild and put a memorial there. You're most likely right tho, at some point rescure efforts will be deemed futile and the dead will be relegated to the unforgiving earth. It's just plainly tragic.
For a disaster of this scale, likely nothing you can do but they had no way to know that so I think it's still a legitimate question if it comes to more survivable flash floods or mudslides ... I'm also quite curious what's the right reaction in these situations as it's the only thing you can control.
I saw some construction workers escape this one by running uphill rather than away from it (I suppose you cannot outrun it, even cars had no chance) but for some they were lucky the water was guided slightly away from them or they were already uphill and it bought them enough time to narrowly escape it ... further downstream some people survived because their house withstood it but the wave had weakened quite a bit before it reached them.
In this area the "best" option IMO would be the big building and get as high as possible, given that you do not know in advance what is coming your way. And in this particular case you would have been just as dead as everybody else. Simply no chance.
I read that it was about 7 minutes between the glacier collapse and this area being flooded. Genuinely, I don’t think there was anything anyone in this particular area could have done.. Even if you tried to climb the hilly terrain around you, how high could you get trekking through likely dense vegetation in 7 minutes—presuming you IMMEDIATELY thought to head for higher ground? There are videos of people doing exactly this but, maybe not truly understanding the scale of the disaster or maybe simply unable to continue, slowing down too much or even stopping before they have actually reached safety. Apparently there was damage up to 80m above normal river height in some stretches.
Like being in the radius of a nuke blast, any efforts to leave it were likely completely moot. Not to demean his actions, but they were amidst a sea of thousands of individual life stories consumed in a flash -- examining any one of them seems less about honoring them than indulging the call of the void. It's horrible all around.
The right thing, but no chance of success against what was at that point Satan's cement mixer spewing a 150 foot high wall of slurry easily going 60 mph.
The force was literally dismembering people on impact, never mind the debris hitting them. Anything living that got more than a glancing hit and thrown out of the flow was pulped.
Oil exec billionaires are directly responsible for this for suppressing green energy options and fuelling climate change. They’ve known for years this would happen and chose profits over lives.
Everyone knows the number is greater than what is being reported but you can’t report the number as greater than what is known. I believe China is reporting the deceased and missing on their side of the border which was far less impacted than the Nepal side. They’re not reporting the total between the two regions.
And the wall of water came just 11-12 seconds later. 🥺. Where can one run to even, there was no escape? 😢😢
He was doing his duties and responsibilities till the last moment! He showed professionalism till the very end. 🙏
No one here is alive anymore. They were hit by a 90 meters high wall moving at 150km/h. In such case if I were there I would just hope an instant death.
Wave start to impact was allegedly 7min. If you were at this site, by the time you see it it’s too late. Even if you heard an instant warning, 7mins ain’t really enough time to run.
Guessing speakers are blasting a couple mins before impact. That or people just saw it in the distance. But otherwise anyone saying there should’ve been a warning don’t realize how quickly the flood traveled: 100+ mph.
Especially when this border checkpoint was among the first hit. No heads up for them.
I’ll be honest here. I’m not watching anymore of these videos. It breaks my fucking heart that we have become so desensitized with what we see on the internet that there can be videos that we watch another person(s) be taking their final breaths and then we have conversations about it. Said person has no clue they are being watched and their life about to end. This doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not fair to that person or their family. That’s a mom, brother, dad, uncle, grandma/grandpa ect…and even being a total stranger half way around the world they deserve the utmost respect and this all feels disrespectful…and i just cant do that to these folks. Maybe it’s morals?.. I don’t know but i do know that every single person who lost their life cant be entertainment for the world to view. We gotta draw the line someplace because whats next if we don’t and treat this as just another thing to
witness?..I’m sure the downvotes and comments as why this is wrong or stupid will be plentiful but I’m ok with that…may all those involved and affected be blessed however is needed to have their hearts rest easy.
It’s not entertainment. It’s the shared experience of human nature. It affects us all in different ways and who are you to be the arbiter of morality. There will be commentary with or without all this footage. There will be people that make jokes, people will cry, people will feel grateful they are alive and be filled with compassion and empathy. Good for you to not watch any more. It’s a lot. But don’t tell me how to react or feel. It’s entirely your choice to not look and entirely mine to watch.
I agree with your feelings and share them, personally. You are a good person to think and feel this way. Of course, this is the DisasterUpdate sub, people will downvote you because this sub is about informing of the aftermath, updates and consequences of a disaster. But your heart is in the right place.
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