Floods that damaged hydropower dams in Nepal and destroyed the main bridge connecting the country to China sh
ow the vulnerability of infrastructure and need for smart rebuilding in a region bearing the brunt of a warming planet, experts say.
The flooding of the Bhotekoshi River on July 8 also killed nine people and damaged an inland container depot th
at was being built to support increasing trade between the two countries. The 10 damaged hydropower facilities, i
cluding three under construction, have a combined capacity that could power 600,000 South Asian homes.
Another smaller flood in the area on July 30 damaged roads and structures, but caused less overall destruct
ion. Elsewhere in the Himalayas, flash floods swept away roads, homes and hotels on Tuesday in northern India, killing at
least four people and leaving many others trapped under debris, officials said.
The Himalayan region, which crosses Nepal and several nearby countries including India, is especially vulne
rable to heavy rains, floods and landslides because the area is warming up faster than the rest of the world due to human-caused climate change. Climate experts say the increasing frequency of extre
me weather has changed the playbook for assessing infrastructure risks while also increasing the need for smart rebuilding plans.
“The statistics of the past no longer apply for the future,” said John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University o
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f Saskatchewan in Canada. “The risk that goes into building a bridge or other infrastructure is generally based on histori
cal observations of past risk, but this is no longer useful because future risk is different and often much higher.”
While damage estimates from the July floods in the Rasuwa region are still being calculated, past construction c
osts give a sense of the financial toll. The Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge a
it was destroyed by a 2015 earthquake that ravaged Nepal.