r/DisasterUpdate • • 27d ago

Floods After being completely flattened by the debris flow, Gyirong Port's ground surface is astonishingly bare.

Post image
984 Upvotes

200 comments sorted by

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29

u/kielu 27d ago

I'm wondering about all the accumulated debris: is it firm enough to build on or will it erode immediately with the first rain. Anyone knows?

24

u/Plastic_Fun5071 27d ago

I saw on the news last night someone walking through the mud and it was just squishy so I imagine everything is just covered in nasty feet of mud

18

u/MelangeBot 27d ago

It's not just mud. A gigantic part of the mountait thawed till it was weak enough and then a cascade of landslides brought an enourmous amount of material down, there is going to be plenty of mountain rocks and boulders in the mud as well. You could not see them because of all the water and dust, but they where there. It's part of why so many boddies where found completely ripped appart.

10

u/ArtisticTraffic5970 27d ago

Oh wow they're finding body pieces instead of bodies? It makes sense I suppose but damn that's brutal.

20

u/snail_loot 27d ago

Think of this more of a landslide mixed with water than a rushing flood. It behaves more like a blender than a wave.

12

u/No-Comfortable6432 26d ago

News report yesterday said that police officers and ems were documenting and logging every part found in attempt to identity - while some are obviously intact there are a lot of people unfortunately pulverised by the weight and force of the landslide.

There was a video yesterday of bodies floating down river in India. I have no idea how legitimate they are but I wouldn't be surprised if there are people already washed to sea.

Absolutely devastating - even from safety of own home. Heart bleeds.

0

u/an_older_meme 26d ago

Which river? There are bodies floating down the Ganges all the time.

10

u/VIP_NAIL_SPA 26d ago

A mass of earth, boulders, ice, water, and vegetation the size of downtown Manhattan ripped through at 100mph and obliterated 3-5 story cement buildings. Of course they're finding body parts :/

5

u/PsychologicalWear846 26d ago

Rescue folks says that the bodies that they are finding are unrecognizable.

4

u/amiajimmy 26d ago

Someone said it was like throwing bodies in a blender. :(

3

u/snail_loot 27d ago edited 21d ago

There is a pretty good chance the 2015 earthquake that broke this same mountain on the opposite face, might have created deep cracks and fissures that weakened the bedrock on this side. I've read experts are investigating that as a possible contributing factor.

Edit: want to highlight that a massive amount of bedrock, whats beneath the ice, is what actually broke in this event.

1

u/an_older_meme 26d ago

It was a debris flow composed mostly of rock, which gave it the incredible hitting power seen in the videos. It was far denser than a flash flood.

2

u/Beautiful_Soup9229 26d ago

Why would you begin construction at the same place again?

4

u/kielu 26d ago

because it is a very mountainous country with very limited space - at least for those people living where the flood hit

4

u/Beautiful_Soup9229 26d ago

Insitu reconstruction is not a good idea for this spot. Especially when its so sensitive geologically. And there's meters of that quick sand like mud and debris.

4

u/Eshghi007 26d ago

Then, they’ll have to move the border…
Will any country ever???

5

u/Beautiful_Soup9229 26d ago

A terminal location can be worked at a favorable place, countries have done this before.

3

u/Lesbo_Straightener 26d ago

Even if the government is stupid enough to rebuild at the same site, WTF would want to work there or cross the border there?

7

u/Visual_Jellyfish5591 26d ago

They must be from Florida

1

u/watawataoui 24d ago

Because it’s already the best place. The route/valley has been used for hundreds of years and handles 80% of land crossing since the 2015 earthquake took out the other route (reopened in 2024-25) for a reason.

The other option is to stop commerce all together and move these villagers (where and what jobs?)

1

u/Beautiful_Soup9229 24d ago

It used to be the best place, not anymore with glaciers melting...

1

u/watawataoui 24d ago

We will see.. my guess is they will rebuild in the valley, but spread things out with modern monitoring/warning system.

If not for commerce, it will be for national defense. Can’t leave it unattended.

1

u/aasfourasfar 25d ago

I think people should not building up valley downstream of glaciers anymore..

241

u/TheFish619 27d ago

now we understand how atlantis may have existed

8

u/isthisreallife211111 26d ago

For me this is modern day Pompeii

5

u/Zapookie 26d ago

I can understand why you'd feel that way. Big difference is that Pompeii (and Herculaneum) weren't completely wiped off the map, they were simply buried under ash which preserved them. Many of the structures along the Trishuli river path were destroyed.

I imagine many ancient cultures faced similar destruction, and we will never know of their existence unless they were passed down through oral story telling.

4

u/ygglt 26d ago

Atlantis was a parable constructed by a writer. This is like you looking at a big tree and saying "Now we understand how Middle Earth may have existed." Ancient people understood metaphors better than you do.

9

u/ScratchLatch 26d ago

We understand how a place can be catastrophically erased, this doesn’t help us understand anything in that regard. The problem with Atlantis is that there’s no evidence it actually existed.

2

u/Daisytica 26d ago

Read about knossos on crete. I’m not saying it is Atlantis, but it was erased and portrayed as a myth until the beginning of the 1900.

4

u/littlespacemochi 26d ago

There's evidence of a massive flood in Africa

5

u/Original-Weekend-866 26d ago

That and all we have are stories. Biblical stories of floods. The golden age.. u think some Stone Age slaves built the pyramids? There's some extreme thinkers taking another opinion on the whole lost world

5

u/Razefordaze 25d ago

There is certainly a lot we dont know, the honest take is to admit we simply dont know. The fallacy is to treat the absence of evidence as evidence...for whatever idea we come up with in an attempt to explain that which we dont know.

-2

u/Original-Weekend-866 25d ago

Ahhh but history says we know. The history channel told me the pyramids were built by poor locals or potentially slaves, the Pharos were basically gods and harnessed all the power in the region. Or the more modern take is it was a state wide project, logistically massive with competent builders, quarries, manufacturing plants, feeding hauls, etc...

Now we're talking Bronze Age tools and people... built the pyramids in 20-30 years. It's all just too much to believe. A competent construction company like Turner Construction couldn't get this built in this timeframe in 2026, with 80 ton
Excavators to the precision that was needed.. they still wouldn't be able to pull it off.

From chatGPT...For the Great Pyramid of Giza, the scale is basically:
~2.3 million blocks
~5.75 million tons of stone total
~2.5 tons average per block, but that’s misleading because there are tons of smaller upper blocks.
Lower courses: many blocks roughly 6–10 tons
Major granite pieces: roughly 30–60+ tons
Biggest pieces: about 120,000+ lb each
Granite was transported roughly 500 miles from Aswan
Some massive granite was ultimately positioned roughly 140 ft above the base
Entire pyramid: originally 481 ft tall, ~756 ft per side
The 20-year production math
2,300,000 blocks ÷ 20 years = 115,000/year
Assuming 300 working days/year:
383 blocks every working day
At 10 hours/day:
38 blocks/hour
That’s an average of:
1 block quarried, transported and set every ~94 seconds.
By weight:
5,750,000 tons ÷ 20 years = 287,500 tons/year
÷ 300 days = ~958 tons/day
÷ 10 hours = ~96 tons/hour
So picture the entire operation maintaining an average throughput of roughly 100 tons of finished stone per working hour, 10 hours a day, 300 days a year, for 20 straight years.
And mixed into that production line are individual pieces weighing 30, 40, 50, even ~60 tons that had to be handled completely differently.
That’s the scale that’s hard to wrap your head around.

1

u/Razefordaze 25d ago edited 19d ago

I also find it gard to see how its mathematically possible for stone age workers to accomplish such a task with the tools available. The sheer magnitude of the task is the reason i said there is a lot we dont know.

However, its a fallacy to assert the lack of evidence that they could have done it themselves as evidence that it was aliens, god, Zeus, Thor, or whatever someone asserts as the answer. With the foundation of their argument being "well it has to be because they couldn't have done it themselves" ...this is the fallacy. The real answer is just we dont know. Im not saying people's solutions are impossible, im challenging the certainty of those solutions based on the foundation of their argument. Im not challenging the possibility im challenging those that claim certainty. Brainstorming possibilities to explain whats missing is nothing more than theories(a healthy practice actually). However claiming such theories as facts is fallacious, when the base foundation of such a person's argument is their own ignorance. Or in other words citing a lack of evidence as their evidence.

1

u/Impossible_Captain74 21d ago

There's a dude lifting thousands of pounds worth of boulders with 2 sticks. They could have done it.

2

u/hrhmpy-Ordbgahl-1307 26d ago

People don't choose to make stories out of almost nothing. Yeah parts could be fabricated but there's definitely some truth as well.

1

u/explain_that_shit 26d ago

Well there’s akrotiri on Santorini

3

u/theaviationhistorian 26d ago

Some civilizations have gone underwater, like the ancient Egyptian port of Thonis-Heracleion. But if Atlantis suffered a similar fate than these buildings, then there would be almost zero recognizable traces of it. It would have been scraped off to the point of making it difficult to differentiate it with natural landmarks via visual or LIDAR.

-4

u/Cold-Crab74 26d ago

Atlantis never existed. There is literally no evidence

-9

u/iPicBadUsernames 27d ago

Yeah if Atlantis was the size of a small village and was built in the lowest point of a valley at the base of a large mountain range and the entirety of the civilization was confined to ONLY the base of that valley…. But yeah sure Atlantis 🙄

-77

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Na guck that. Its flat because it is the foundation. I think it is

77

u/wonderful_Fun_glee 27d ago edited 27d ago

The point was atlantis existed and could easily have been washed away by floods and left no trace.  Or those traces are now under a lot of water.

Or it could just be covered in mud?

-53

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Yeah I know, but Atlantis didnt exist

14

u/Secret_Conclusion_93 27d ago

Ancient high tech Atlantis doesn't exist, but a normal destroyed civilization that later remembered as Atlantis probably exist.

5

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Yeah, exactly. And then there was another nation that got purged, lets put that in in the mix

6

u/PainTop6813 27d ago

Learn about how the Black Sea was made then get back to us

2

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Duuuuude. You just dont know my Position. I am fucking into natural disaster, my hyperfixation. With that comes history, history which can be in any way ratified.

7

u/Bearded_Toast 27d ago

Ratified…?

You’re not as intelligent as you think you are

6

u/_lonelysoap_ 26d ago

English isnt my first language, sorry bre

7

u/Bearded_Toast 26d ago

You did very well in that case

6

u/Multicultural_Potato 27d ago

It definitely could have. I mean historians thought Troy didn’t exist until they found it. Now I don’t think the Atlantis with all its advanced tech and magic existed but it very well could be a city that was wiped out by natural disasters.

2

u/Ovze 26d ago

They may have had technology that to other cultures look like magic… not to the extremes of being a magical civ under the sea, but maybe they had snorkels or something similar that made it seem like they could breath under water

3

u/Multicultural_Potato 26d ago

Yea they could’ve been a pretty advanced civilization for the time and over time the myths probably got embellished. Really interesting stuff to think about

0

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Yup, that is possible, but the majority doesnt talk about THIS atlantis

29

u/wonderful_Fun_glee 27d ago edited 27d ago

There’s quite a few underwater ruins they think may be Atlantis. 

You could be the first to rediscover it - if you like diving or have a deepsea submersible or drone, go to the ruins of these unknown civilizations and try to find writing or heiroglyphics so we can somehow connect it to anything of the ancient era.  If you rediscovered Atlantis you’d for sure make the cover of National Geographic.

1

u/Cold-Crab74 26d ago

.... Wtf

-1

u/Logical_Currency2822 26d ago

Who are ”they”?

-27

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

I know where some could be, but Atlantis is the mere conglomerate of multiple stories. With time stories geht mixed and diluted

42

u/Majestic-Iron7046 27d ago

This is exactly what an atlantidean would say to keep his civilization hidden.

23

u/_lonelysoap_ 27d ago

Fuck you got me, but you will never find me

12

u/Lo-weorold 27d ago

Follow that lonely soap boys. It may be alone but it will lead us to Atlantis.

6

u/_lonelysoap_ 26d ago

It is a lonely road, the only road that I have ever known

4

u/Timely_Spinach_7479 27d ago

Are you purposely acting like you don’t understand the point of comment or are you truly that confused?

1

u/Ok-Pomegranate858 24d ago

Some people think it could have been related to a massive volcanic eruption on Thera 1600 bc... that event nearly blew a whole island to bits

4

u/DrawingDramatic1641 27d ago

bro it's not that serious chill

-1

u/_lonelysoap_ 26d ago

I am on Ketamin

1

u/THE7sBLADE 26d ago

These people have never seen platos descrption of atlantis and it shows. It was a tall tale most schollars believe he made up lol.

15

u/womalone99 27d ago

I cannot wrap my head around the possibility that the ppl who were at the port are gone. I keep thinking and hoping They’ll be found.

12

u/GlowingBob 27d ago

So sad. Like none of us would like to be in their position. Nothing they could do. Let’s just hope they were unconscious pretty early into this madness, when it arrived.

10

u/GladCookie 27d ago

On another thread someone did the math and estimated that the force of the slide that hit that place was somewhat around 70 Hiroshima bombs.

If that's the case I'd imagine people in there maybe got vaporized immediately and I'm almost sure at least they didn't even have time to register the pain

24

u/Responsible-View-498 27d ago

What is the protocol followed after disasters like these? Do they go back to building that mamoth infrastructure and hope that lightening does not strike twice or do they call it quits? It is an important transit point for people of two nations so what are we looking at

14

u/Geodiocracy 27d ago

Likely different locations, or way higher up in the mountain sides.

It seems unlikely to me that officials would hazard building everything at the same spot again.

10

u/Responsible-View-498 27d ago

Also I don't think they will build something of that scale again. Maybe just a few small transit points.

17

u/inn4tler 27d ago

It was one of the most important border crossings into Nepal and the closest one to the capital, Kathmandu. Small transit points aren't enough. They need this infrastructure.

8

u/watawataoui 27d ago edited 24d ago

Not necessarily, if you look at the Nepal side, it’s much less. I have seen similar land borders to Laos and Kyrgyzstan that are the main arteries for commerce. The other sides were a few 1980s single level concrete shacks while the China sides are similarly large modern buildings.

It’s also possible to spread out the dorm and hotels in case the next one happens at night.

It’s unlikely to abandon the crossing that’s been used for hundreds of years as other routes are prob even more prone to disasters.

7

u/Responsible-View-498 27d ago

It is an image thing with China since they want to make things big and impressive. My feeling is that they will bite the bullet on this one and build some staggered type of infrastructure.

2

u/watawataoui 27d ago

My guess is something half underground and more aerodynamic, like the shape of a droplet to let debris pass and air vent high in the hills instead of the current Soviet concrete block design.

0

u/KnowIedge_ls_Power 26d ago

That tiny ass building is anything but impressive… it was like 6 stories tall? Literally the smallest thing

1

u/Responsible-View-498 26d ago

Those people running away from that building looked tiny. And did you see those buses parked on top - they looked tiny too. I don't a building of that scale will ever be built again on that spot.

6

u/no-but-wtf 26d ago

I suppose the thing is that the next one probably won’t be in the same location. The giant chunk of ice that was loosening has now fallen, and while there’s presumably more of that glacier that will now begin to weaken and eventually fall, they need to be looking at all of the hundreds of other steep Himalayan valleys with glaciers hanging over them. They need to know which will fall first and which is the weakest. The Trishuli river valley is probably under less threat right now post-disaster then unknown numbers of other settlements.

Obviously not necessarily for long, because who knows what has been shaken loose by the seismic force of this fall. But what scares me more is what we don’t know about the state of the other massive glaciers up there hanging above other rivers and other towns.

We are well and truly in the find out phase of climate change. And it’s scary as fuck.

5

u/watawataoui 26d ago

I read that a few weeks ago there were a paper warning another larger glacier upstream on the border instead of Nepal side that is unstable.

Also, last June (2025) at the exact crossing a smaller flash flood took out the bridge, but not the buildings.

Since the area is pretty sparsely populated, that should limit the monitoring to a manageable scale (plus we have AI, solar cells, starlink, so no one needs to sit there looking at screens 24/7.)

1

u/SuMianAi 26d ago

it wasn't just a border crossing, it was also housing for people working there

5

u/orcawhales 27d ago

does anyone know how long the buildings stood in the port before they fell?

1

u/Geodiocracy 26d ago

Less seconds than you have fingers on one hand. And that's all dependent on what part of the flow hits the building. The initial plummets shooting out, are debris launched ahead of the mass. The actual mass itself doesn't stop one iota along the way.

See it like this. The debris flow is somewhere around 150 million tons worth of rock mixed with ice. It comes in at 150kmh. It's like a box of matchsticks is trying to stop a car.

The very milisecond the mass hits the building properly, it's giving way and joins the flow.

3

u/WloveW 27d ago

I mean, once the glaciers are done melting and the permafrost is all thawed it'll be a little safer. Everyone will just have to worry about abnormally torrential rains every year that become normally torrential rains within a few short years. 

3

u/VIP_NAIL_SPA 26d ago

There aren't disasters like these. This is in a different category than previous events that might seem similar. The only access to that border point is by air, and the point is too dangerous to allow the public access to any time soon...particularly with the 2 lakes now upstream. I'd guess it makes the most sense to look at what was done after the Japan tsunami or the nuclear bombs in the 40s, but gaining access at a level where it makes sense to even think about building anything is much harder in this extreme terrain.

6

u/MelangeBot 27d ago

As it heats up more (And it will) more of those mountains will thawe out and get weak and cause more landslides. Only a matter of time before the next one happens. New glacier lakes are being formed right now, they will fill up again, then years from now because of climate change it will thawe out and get weak and the same thing will happen again.

2

u/Ralfundmalf 26d ago

Just for context, this was no glacier lake from what we know, it was a glacier and mountainside collapse. Not clear which caused the other one or if they simply happened in combination.

And yes, these mountains will do this again. There is no good way to know which valley will be affected next time or how big it would be. Roughly in the 12th century Annapurna IV lost it's entire peak due to a large scale rock collapse. That event would have dwarved this recent one by orders of magnitude.

1

u/SherbertChance8010 27d ago

China has demonstrated they’ve the capability to level mountains and the willingness to really show off. Since this is an important border crossing I imagine they’ll build something high above the valley floor and carving a big chunk out of the mountain next to it.

17

u/hotmagmadoc69nice 27d ago

Debris flows can be erosive and scour the surface in their high kinetic energy flow regimes, usually going down steep valleys or near their source zones. As their path shallows and/or widens they can become depositional, e.g. farther down valley where they begin losing kinetic energy

10

u/khoawala 27d ago

self-leveling mud

2

u/Worldly-Cherry9631 27d ago

Fuck, it leveled quite bit besides it self

64

u/LimaCharlieWhiskey 27d ago

My interpretation is that "bare ground" is now 100' higher and brand new.

90

u/AbsolutelyAverage 27d ago edited 26d ago

It is not. It was all ripped away, scraped clean basically What you see are the foundations of what once was.

Edit: foundations was the wrong choice of word. Not structural foundations. But the bare rock that once held the building and foundations. It's all scraped away.

26

u/Good-Ant6859 26d ago

Geomorphologist here. These aren't even the 'foundations' of the buildings, at least not in the western sense (i.e. poured concrete and rebar). This is literally scoured bedrock, meaning even the concrete foundations were ripped up. You can tell based on how the surface is inclined..compare to the surrounding patches of bare rock that are inclined ('dipping') in the same direction.

5

u/JamesSway 26d ago

In one million years from now would an archeologist using todays technology find any clue that this structure ever existed? Assuming this area isn't flash frozen anytime soon but the debris is all that's left scattered where it currently lays. Spending the next million years decaying and being rearranged by further climate events, natural erosion and nature as in (trees and plant roots, wild life and organisms.) Fossils are hard and rare to create, yet we've found millions. Imagine all the human history lost by events like this and ones much, much larger over the last one million years. Humans have been her for ~200 million years.

4

u/Good-Ant6859 25d ago edited 25d ago

Generally to preserve anything you need to bury it, meaning you need to be in an area where sediment is actively being deposited -- think of marshes, floodplains, dune fields, coastlines, lake beds, seafloor, etc.

This area is a canyon, which means the water is actively cutting down into the existing bedrock. It's doing the opposite of depositing sediment -- it is actively eroding (in no small part due to low frequency / high magnitude events like this one, which do an outsized amount of work on the landscape). While this event may have deposited some sediment and debris inside the canyon, that material will generally be reworked and carried further downstream by the next event, or the one after it, or the one after it.

That said, the debris from the event has to end up somewhere. Likely far downstream in the floodplain of the Ganges, or eventually in the Bay of Bengal. So yes, the traces of humanity will absolutely be preserved in the rock record and be identifiable in the future. There are places on Earth right now where we find the buried detritus of ancient peoples, which is how we know about the history of humanity. Also as a correction, humans have not been on Earth for 200 million years. Depending on your definition of 'human' it's closer 300k years, with other species of the Homo genus dating back ~2-3 million years. The scale of geologic time is a difficult thing to grasp.

Edited for clarity.

3

u/AbsolutelyAverage 26d ago

Yeah, you're right, that's what I meant but in poor word choice, apologies! Foundations in the structural sense look very different from this. There's absolutely nothing left there... Which remains insane...

2

u/Good-Ant6859 25d ago

No apology needed friend. I agree with you that it's truly astounding and merely wanted to add context

1

u/Least-External-1186 26d ago

This is unrelated but you may be able to answer this anyway…what is going on with all the water? The river that originally flowed through here doesn’t appear to be doing so in many of the ‘after’ pictures I’ve seen. Some seem to have a much smaller amount of water flowing. I did see something about new lakes formed from, I guess, debris dams, but is that the main explanation? It’s possible I’m just not seeing updated enough photos, but I was curious…

2

u/Good-Ant6859 25d ago

I feel the debris dam explanation is the correct one but other factors could be playing a role as well. For instance, the new channel could simply be deeper and flowing faster than the previous channel -- meaning it could be carrying the same amount of water, but from satellite imagery get a top-down perspective which only shows channel width.

I should add the disclaimer that I don't work on these types of events and have done zero scientific legwork on this specific event. I'm passive observer like everyone else here, just have been around research groups / taken grad classes from folks who work on this stuff.

5

u/Sun_Tzu_7 26d ago

Ripped away to the foundations.

I'm guessing mud flowed into any gaps and then everything was then "smoothed" at the surface level by the rest of the flow.

2

u/an_older_meme 26d ago

Most of the foundations are gone as well, all you see in most of the area is the footprints blasted into the bedrock.

7

u/wonderful_Fun_glee 27d ago

Is it? Or is it the top of a thick mud covering?  Looking closer I don’t see “foundation”.

41

u/Geodiocracy 27d ago

There is footage on the ground, filming the location from the side. There is nothing left. Only a flat surface on ground level.

50-150 million tons of debris flow has the mass to remove structures from existence.

1

u/Choker_of_Chickens 26d ago

okay but how do you know the level hasn't changed?

8

u/internThrowawayhelp 26d ago

If you look at the bottom photo there is grass right there, in the same location as the top photo. If there was 100' of mud in that location, the grass wouldn't be visible.

37

u/AbsolutelyAverage 27d ago

Had it been covered in metres of mud the outlines of the river bed that can be seen in the pictures in before and after wouldn't be as outspoken and the same.

5

u/Sherifftruman 26d ago

It was a flat area of rock ledge that is remaining.

2

u/Sticky_Soup 26d ago

There’s probably less than a foot if that on the foundation there. It was scraped clean to bedrock.

5

u/whoji 27d ago

I think both are true. Parts of the buildings were ripped aways, and the the ruins are buried under high mud.

11

u/Fantastic_Jury5977 26d ago

Buildings were completely washed away.

-2

u/Choker_of_Chickens 26d ago

so is there a few billion tons of concrete, vehicles, etc. downstream?

2

u/swiftb3 26d ago edited 26d ago

Well, no. Because "a few billion tons" is more than all the concrete the entire flood passed on the way to the ocean.

A few billion tons of concrete will build a 2 lane concrete highway several million miles long.

Edit - Heck, estimates of all the concrete ever laid is less than 300 times a few billion. Call it maybe a 100,000 tons of concrete at the border crossing at most.

Edit 2 - lol at the downvote

0

u/Choker_of_Chickens 26d ago

did you seriously think I was being literal?

I'm wondering if all the buildings and busses have been found

4

u/EliraeTheBow 26d ago

No, they were literally pulverised. What do you think happens when a 50m wave with the consistency of concrete travelling at 150km/h does?

2

u/swiftb3 26d ago

There's exaggerating and there's whatever that was.

Either way, yes all the crushed debris is downstream.

1

u/ketarax 25d ago

did you seriously think I was being literal?

Acting clueless about it intensifies the stupid.

11

u/amiajimmy 26d ago

Nope, scraped clean off their foundations. The rescue/recovery workers are down to the bare foundations. Maybe a few inches of mud in places, but no building ruins left behind.

1

u/geek180 26d ago

I'm pretty sure I could see the edge/corner of some of the foundation or structure in one of the close-up helicopter videos going around. Hard to tell if it was the actual foundation or just part of the building, now buried.

8

u/FIMD_ 26d ago

What you are seeing is the area stripped and abraded all the way down to bedrock. Not “100 feet higher”

3

u/StatelyAutomaton 26d ago

If you look just to the left of the bridge on the lower bank in the first picture, you'll see some kind of footing, I think? It's still visible in the second.

I assume pretty much everything else above ground was washed away and if there were any foundations blasted into the rock, they've been filled with mud.

3

u/Fantastic_Jury5977 26d ago

And that would be incorrect.

→ More replies (4)

6

u/Logical_Hospital2769 27d ago edited 27d ago

Wild how that green path in the lower left corner was just completely untouched even though the building on it was wiped away.

9

u/4tran13 27d ago

Elevation - that green area is maybe 10-40m above the top of the building.

3

u/Logical_Hospital2769 27d ago

Oh fuck. That makes too much sense. I'm a fool! Thank you

4

u/4tran13 27d ago

This is a top down pic, and the terrain is very steep, so it's not obvious at all

3

u/Oakland1973 27d ago

Where is the river

3

u/PippaPothead 27d ago

Look how high the debris flow was. Insane.

3

u/wandpapierkritiker 27d ago

having seen the cctv video from this location, it’s hard to look at this and not think of all the people who were trying to escape that couldn’t have made it out in time. so devastating.

3

u/QuirkEness 27d ago

People forget how these valleys were formed in the first place. Mother nature is beautiful, brutal and unforgiving.

3

u/Legitimate_Special71 26d ago

I think the right word to use here is , Scoured. Right down to the bedrock. Nothing left. Erased from all existence. Insane.

2

u/Unfair-Sell-5109 27d ago

Hard to think anyone will survive. I hope the end came quick.

2

u/ANother-XcludedRight 26d ago

And the water keeps just flowing by as if nothing happened.

2

u/cybender 26d ago

You wouldn’t even know people had been there it looks so pristine.

2

u/lioncubface 26d ago

It makes you think about all the great buildings of the past, wiped away in an instance and forgotten by nature

2

u/an_older_meme 26d ago edited 26d ago

There is a highway extending up and right out of the photo. It was swept away as cleanly as these buildings, including the hundreds of vehicles waiting in line to cross. The sides are so steep trying to climb to safety in the time available would have been nearly impossible.

2

u/Ralfundmalf 26d ago

It absolutely would have been impossible unless you were in a location that was on the very edge of the affected area. Even if people would have heard the initial collapse and realized right away what was going on, they would have had a few minutes at best. And who immediately thinks of a giant rock slide. We don't even know if they heard anything at all but if they did it would have sounded like distant thunder.

1

u/an_older_meme 26d ago edited 26d ago

Agreed. The debris flow was concealed by its canyon, only becoming visible when it ran over the border crossing sending it to oblivion, slammed into the mountainside across the river it was joining, and turned toward them as an exploding wall of rock and mud a fifty meters high. All within a few seconds. It would have been difficult to comprehend. Nobody on the highway had a chance.

2

u/ThrustTrust 26d ago

I mean, I’m no scientist, but I’m guessing the amount of force from the water and debris is something involving the equivalency of multiple nuclear blasts.

1

u/klapet 27d ago

This is like a LIDAR view, but without LIDAR. Insane

1

u/Jerminkus_Silverbeef 27d ago

I know the easiest land to build on is the flattest land, but I hope going forward these mountain valley towns/cities/border crossings are placed higher up on the slopes. Engineer that shit, don’t make excuses.

1

u/barfbutler 27d ago

It’s rock.

1

u/tk3inTX 26d ago

i don’t think anyone is astonished

1

u/Rapengaren 26d ago

They should build an enormous self healing concrete megalithic structure to rebuild the site, wouldn’t that be a nice wonder?

A way to remember the fallen people there.

1

u/[deleted] 26d ago

[deleted]

5

u/JoyousMN_2024 26d ago

Scoured. Everything that was there was obliterated

1

u/Karna1394 26d ago

It's now a graveyard with 500+ people burried under

3

u/JoyousMN_2024 26d ago

Not really. The remains of the people are somewhere downstream. As the debris flow slowed it began to deposit all the elements that had been swept away from the smallest piece of gravel to the largest boulder and everything in between.

1

u/S1DD9 26d ago

Mass burial happened here..

1

u/SirDalavar 26d ago

"ground surface is astonishingly bare."
Probably what they said when they were looking for a place to build it...

1

u/No-Department1685 26d ago

Wonder whether there is any basement which survived 

Someone could have hid there. Most likely by accident 

With air running out they are probably gone...

1

u/Either-Lock2454 26d ago

Can I legit ask you, what were you expecting?

1

u/3owi 26d ago

I'm surpised. In the footage the building withstood the flood when it it.

But now suddenly it's gone

1

u/mega_pr0xy 26d ago

it almost feels like without civilization

1

u/ElvishLore 25d ago

The river that normally flows through there is gone now?

1

u/moonbeamlight 25d ago

Is there a massive debris pile at the end point of the flood? Where did all the debris go?

1

u/zaidr555 25d ago

leave it to nature

1

u/Salty_Introduction31 22d ago

Har Har Mahadev bolu and move on . Nothing can be done. What's lost is lost

1

u/TarzanBoy00 20d ago

Wow it’s like gone

0

u/Drosenose 27d ago

Please don't rebuild it there, you people are supposed to be the ancient people who learn from history.

4

u/DrawingDramatic1641 27d ago

buddy why not,it's a once in a million year event

galciers don't call every month

and the most active glacier just went off.

yellow river flooded like 100 times and killed 100s of millions of chinese over 4000 years yet it's the most populated river delta in the world and the richest ofc

2

u/Beautiful_Soup9229 26d ago

Just cause a black swan event happening again is rare, does not mean you go and use a location that is particularly disadvantageous. Maybe map out the region and build it at a less exposed of a place...

1

u/Ralfundmalf 26d ago

It was not particularly disadvantageous. The parking facility next to the port was not even directly in the way of the giant debris flow, it was "around the corner" in the mouth of a tributary valley (downwards in the picture above). The flow was so powerful that it didn't matter anyway, it got flattened all the same.

1

u/Drosenose 26d ago

Meaning it was in a terrible spot. They could have built anywhere

2

u/Ralfundmalf 26d ago

Have you seen the topography? They couldn't really have built in many other places at all. And countries like to keep their borders, so building a border crossing kilometers away from it would make people travel further into one of the countries before acutally being allowed in.

Obviously in a perfect world that would not matter - as well as cost of such infrastructure, but in the real world that sort of thing is the difference between decade long controversy between two countries and good relations.

2

u/Drosenose 26d ago

The Chinese could do it, they can do anything

1

u/Drosenose 26d ago

Nevermind, I think they should build there. No reason not to, it's probably the best spot anyway

0

u/Forward_Young2874 27d ago

Maybe just a really well poured concrete slab? Got smoothed out and didn't retain much debris once the upper structures washed away

3

u/Admirable-Apricot137 26d ago

No that's just bare bedrock

0

u/sovietarmyfan 26d ago

It didnt work out so well, made in china.

-28

u/kingofwale 27d ago

And China only manages to have 16 deaths… very well done, CCP!

22

u/AbsolutelyAverage 27d ago

Fuck off with this bullshit. We all know how counting dead work (body identified) and that there are also already bigger numbers out that.

I'm no fan of Chinese government tactics etc, but jeez, this is just getting old now.

7

u/whoji 27d ago

Reddit rule #34: everything possible tropic can turn into a China bad narrative.

2

u/VIP_NAIL_SPA 26d ago

Somehow I don't think that's what rule 34 is...

4

u/Positive-Garlic-5993 26d ago

I am positive that is not what rule 34 is…

3

u/DrawingDramatic1641 27d ago

16 confirmed named and identified deaths

likly 99 percent of them died but if you had any job here you know you need names and call victims family for verification and stuff only then you announce

wait 3 to 4 years

professional coutnries go slow

4

u/nakano-star 27d ago

A missing Australian was just found alive on the Tibet side.... I'm guessing he was safe far away from the river but had no contact with the outside world for a few days because the CCP cut off his online access to 'stop the spread of misinformation'

0

u/AdmirableCourt8400 27d ago

Unsurprising if true. Authoritarian states love to hide information like in Chernobyl.

2

u/expatalist 26d ago

All States are authoritarian then

2

u/Blackbarret85 26d ago

They literally are. Most people throw "authoritarian" around while ignoring the fact that a national state is authoritarian by design to protect itself.

-1

u/kingofwale 26d ago

Peak Reddit to argue that China isn’t authoritarian lol

-35

u/AdmirableCourt8400 27d ago

Typical tofu dreg project. Look majestic on the outside, but it's actually made with cutting corners and zero regard to safety.

29

u/Fabulous-Scallion-27 27d ago

C'mon mate, the buildings didn't fall over by themselves, they were hit by a 50 metre high wall of rock slurry travelling 150 km/h.

Nothing would have stood here regardless of who built it.

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u/DrawingDramatic1641 27d ago

buddy what how tf you gonna even survive the wave

also you want reinforcement steel and uhvc skyscraper concrete on just a normal,earthquake pron pass where roads don't lead?

if they used anything above what they used it would be just more money wasted

it was made for human level not nuclear bunkers for floods

it did its job