A 97-Year-Old Rode an Excavator Out of Nepal’s Flood

Guna Maya Bohara, 97, left a Nuwakot care home in an earthmover bucket after eight to nine hours in mud. Relatives saw her head move on August 26, then a JCB had to finish the job because no ambulance could reach her.

Nepal Police put the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli flood at 1,252 dead on September 3, with 4,875 still missing. Her ride in that bucket is the small version of a larger collapse: when the corridor’s roads and gauges vanished, heavy machines, ziplines and a rebuilt Chinese highway became the rescue grid.

A Head Shake in the Mud at Devighat

Bohara was in her ground-floor room at the Senior Citizens Welfare Foundation in Devighat, a riverside town in Nuwakot, when the surge arrived. She did not know a mass of ice and rock had come off a high slope near the Nepal-Tibet border. Water and debris shoved her to one edge of the floor, where witnesses said the current ran weaker. Other people caught in the stronger flow on that floor did not live.

Her grandson Rasik Bohra said she had been stuck in mud and wreckage for around eight to nine hours when the family saw a small movement. “She was shaking her head,” he said. That was the sign she was alive.

Nepal Police and Nepali Army crews spent about four hours clearing rubble so they would not crush anyone still buried. Relatives had come with a JCB. Dipak Bohara, her great-nephew, who had travelled from Kathmandu, remembered the machine working the debris “inch by inch” until there was space to lift her in its bucket.

How Guna Maya Bohara Survived the Nuwakot Flood

Once she was free, crews put her in the large metal bucket of the earthmover and carried her across ground ambulances could not cross. Sludge covered her clothes, hair and face. She sat silent. Rasik said, “I was emotional. I can’t express that feeling.”

She looked like a warrior returning from battle.

Dipak Bohara, great-nephew, after the Devighat rescue

She was taken to Bir Hospital in Kathmandu. Rasik, speaking in the first days after the pull-out, said, “Nothing happened to her. She is totally fine now.” Doctors later described a different picture. As of September 2 she was still on the ward, her arms and legs black and blue, with a pre-existing disability in her legs and a hand injury from the water still waiting on a CT scan and an X-ray. They diagnosed acute stress disorder. She survived on fruit juice for two days, then milk and full meals, Dipak said.

She has outlived her husband by 81 years. She was eight when she married him in Nuwakot’s Suryagadhi. She never had children of her own. She raised 13 nephews and 12 nieces, packing roasted maize for their school lunches, and at 83 she moved into the care home, close enough that her nieces could visit daily. She had lived there more than a decade. Of the people who share her blood, none remain. Twenty-five nieces and nephews now take turns at the bed.

The government’s survivor list also recorded two two-year-old girls, Sabya Munakami and Kabya Munakami, as found safe at Devighat on August 27. The file did not say where they were when the water came, who was with them, or how they stayed alive.

The Family Brought a JCB Because Ambulances Could Not

The bucket was not a stunt. Roads into the care home had gone. Heavy machinery had to cut a path before anyone could move her. That is the second fact sitting under the rescue film: along this river, the official ambulance network ended when the pavement ended.

Geological assessments put the flood’s travel at nearly 100 kilometres down the Lhende, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli. In its path it took nine hydropower projects, nine bank branches, 19 road bridges and 40 kilometres of highway, along with the Gyirong Port complex, Nepal’s main overland gate for trade with China. More than 300 vehicles waiting at the checkpoint were lost.

Bidur, downstream in Nuwakot, lost so much of its river front that residents later pulled a newly strung zipline across the Trishuli to move people where the bridges had been. Helicopters ferried the living to an army barracks that became a relief hub. The same class of machine that lifted Bohara has been used to shift bodies and animal carcasses through silt that still smells in the heat.

Rasik’s relief was already mixed with a search. “There are so many people like me who are stuck,” he said.

What Caused the Bhote Koshi Flood

The U.S. Geological Survey first logged the shock as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, then recast it. Long-period waves and satellite images showed a glacial collapse and debris flow at 08:37 a.m. Nepal time on August 26 (02:52:10 UTC), at 28.271 degrees north, 85.515 degrees east, depth 0.0 kilometres, magnitude 5.2. A second landslide followed about three hours later. The agency mapped the flood’s downstream path from Langtang country toward the lower Trishuli.

Preliminary field readings described a section of glacier and bedrock about 600 metres wide coming off a slope near 5,200 metres and falling about 1,200 metres into the Lhende Khola. Geomorphologist Kristen Cook at Université Grenoble Alpes measured about seven and a half minutes from that slope failure to the flow arriving at the Chinese border post. Water in the Trishuli at Galchhi rose as much as nine metres in 30 minutes.

THE CLOCK ON AUGUST 26

1. 8:37 a.m. Nepal time: The USGS records the glacial collapse near the Nepal-China border.
2. About 7.5 minutes later: Cook’s timing puts the debris at the Gyirong border post.
3. 8:56 a.m.: Nepal’s Flood Forecasting Division first hears, from Rasuwa officials and the disaster authority, that water has already hit Timure.
4. Four minutes after that: The division issues a downstream warning. Large parts of Rasuwa are already under the surge. The care home’s ground floor in Devighat is in the same morning’s path.

Automatic stations on the upper Bhote Koshi were built to catch a rising river and shout before towns went under. The surge wrecked them before they sent a packet. “None of the stations was able to send us an alert,” said Binod Parajuli, a senior divisional hydrologist in the Flood Forecasting Division. “We failed.” He thinks the late warning still helped people farther downriver, and he said a system that only watches inside Nepal cannot beat a flood that starts across a border.

The same corridor had already taken hits. In July 2016 a moraine-dammed lake in Tibet’s Poiqu basin burst and sent water into the Bhotekoshi, a pattern documented in research on glacial lake floods in the Himalayas. On July 8, 2025, drainage of a supraglacial lake in Tibet swept away the Friendship Bridge at Rasuwagadhi and killed at least nine people. Three weeks later the river rose again. Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, compared August 26 with the Chamoli disaster in India and said this event was two to three times larger by volume.

Bodies Recovered as Far Downstream as Chitwan

On September 3, the ninth day of the search, Nepal Police released a district list that adds to 1,252. Most of the dead were not found in Rasuwa, where the water first tore through Timure and Syabrubesi. They were found in the plains, where the river dumped what it had carried.

DEATHS BY DISTRICT, SEPTEMBER 3

The Nawalparasi West count includes 18 bodies recovered in India and handed back. Nuwakot, where Bohara was pulled out, is fourth on the list at 177. The missing figure stands at 4,875. Foreign ministry spokesman Lok Bahadur Chhetri said 11,993 people had been rescued. Chinese authorities, in an early September count, reported 16 dead and 546 missing in Tibet. Nepal’s confirmed dead are already near the 1,336 killed in the 1993 floods, long treated as the modern benchmark.

On September 1, Nepal Police said a drone search over Betravati in Bidur Municipality-10 had found 24 bodies in a single house. That is the other use of the machines that saved Bohara: they are now a morgue service in silt deep enough to hide a household.

https://x.com/NepalPoliceHQ/status/2094744372281754058

Families have been asked to give DNA at Nepal Police Hospital in Maharajgunj or the nearest district office. A 19-member Indian forensic team is working with Nepal Police, with further specialist groups from China, Singapore and South Korea. Prime Minister Balendra Shah has said 279 workers were brought out of hydropower sites where, in the first count, more than 900 people from those projects were unaccounted for. At tunnels near Chilime and Syabrubesi, later slides washed out helicopter pads, so the excavators needed to pump and dig the mud could not be flown in.

Heavy Machines Now Do the Work of Roads

On the Tibetan side, the G216 national highway, the only road to the Gyirong crossing, was torn out with the port. China spent a week airdropping kit and sending crews on foot, a trek that took more than 10 hours, until a temporary dump-rock road opened at 10 a.m. on September 2. CCTV showed heavy plant rolling toward the wreck of the inspection complex. Zhong Wenjun, who led a China Anneng rescue group, called it the hardest job he had taken. Nearly 700 people had been on the road repair. River speeds of six to seven metres a second kept eating the fill.

HOW PEOPLE MOVE WITH THE ROADS GONE

• Earthmover buckets: Patients, including Bohara, were carried in JCB and excavator scoops where ambulances could not roll.
• A Bidur zipline: Residents strung a cable over the Trishuli so people could cross after the bridges went.
• Army helicopters: Aircraft shuttled the living to the Bidur barracks and dropped food and water into cut-off valleys.
• The G216 fill: Chinese crews rebuilt a passable lane with rock so plant and search dogs could reach Gyirong for the first time in a week.
• Motorbikes on the last mile: With trucks blocked and aircraft scarce, some aid runs have shifted to bikes and drones to find settlements still off the map.

Two Nepali government sources said Kathmandu plans to put seismic sensors, cameras and a satellite link at Timure, the border settlement on the same corridor, after the gauges there died in the first minutes. The Department of Hydrology and Meteorology and the China Meteorological Administration held a video meeting in which China again promised to flag rising water on its side, a pledge first written into a 2019 disaster memorandum that did not fire on August 26. On September 3 Beijing sent a third aid flight of tents, blankets, medical suits and satellite phones, while about 1,500 Nepalis were still stranded at the Kerung point and about 100 Nepalis were listed missing in Tibet.

She Sings at Night and Asks About the Water

Bohara sometimes sings in the ward. It is the same bhajan, Hare Ram, Hare Krishna, that she sang at the care home and on temple visits. Then she asks, more than once, “Why did the water hit me?” Dipak has tried a simpler story than the ice and rock, telling her a lake far above them had burst. She seems to follow. Hours later she asks again.

Apart from the song and the question, she has mostly stopped speaking. Sudden movements break long spells of stillness. The government is covering the hospital bill. The family that packed her maize lunches is still looking for other names in the missing lists Rasik could not even count.

The clip of a 97-year-old in a yellow bucket travelled because it looked like a finish. In Nuwakot it was a workaround. The roads that should have carried an ambulance are still a problem for the people the river has not given back.