1,643 Nepalese children escaped a mud tsunami that left nearly 800 dead and 3,000 missing (with 13 dead and 546 missing on the Chinese side) at the Sino-Nepalese border. A Nepalese school administrator had the foresight to lead the students to the heights of the mountains flanking the riverbed.
The images are striking: a gentle river on whose banks people had settled. A fundamental error that the collapse of a glacier would ruthlessly reveal. In the canyon, the waves, constricted by the walls, rose to several tens of meters, while in the wider valley, the torrent’s bed swelled by 300 meters.
The footage captured events far upstream, leaving one to wonder what on earth these houses and this city were doing several kilometers downstream, in the path of this mud torrent, and far below the cameraman’s vantage point.
In our country, the conception of space followed a completely different logic: developing a plateau on a hill or mountain for housing, and entrusting agriculture to the valley. This was a traditional and beneficial concept throughout Imerina, before the colonial administration decided to conquer the rice fields and the Malagasy Republic perpetuated this double folly: leveling the hills of Anjeva to fill in the Betsimitatatra and floating the ’67 hectares’ polder district there.
No glacier risks detaching from 5,000 meters of altitude in our tropics, and neither the Ikopa nor the Mamba have the flow of Nepal’s enclosed watercourses. However, when the river and its tributaries swell together from the ‘fahavaratra’ rains or cyclonic precipitation, they transform the Betsimitatatra into a Mesopotamia. It becomes a vast sea where the water has reclaimed its rights—that is, its course. These floods are slightly less devastating than the impressive catastrophe that struck this Himalayan valley. Natural disasters occur so that humanity has the choice to learn (or not) from its mistakes.
Captured & Published at: 2026-08-31 05:38:58 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/08/gagner-les-hauteurs.html