Nepal plans to rebuild an early-warning system for landslides along part of its border with China, installing seismic sensors, cameras and a satellite link a week after a glacial flood killed more than a thousand people, two Nepali government sources told Reuters.
The equipment is being set up at Timure, a border settlement in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, on the same river corridor where a collapsing glacier sent a wall of mud, water and rock down through the mountain valleys. The stretch of frontier lies in one of the most sensitive parts of Nepal’s border with China’s Tibet region — high-altitude terrain closely watched by Kathmandu, Beijing and New Delhi.
Central to the plan is a Very Small Aperture Terminal, or VSAT, a satellite system intended to keep monitoring posts connected when mobile networks fail, so that fresh hazards can be spotted and warnings issued quickly. Such a blackout occurred during the flood, which knocked out at least four gauging stations near the border.
The sources described a previous early-warning system that transmitted a message every few minutes but was swept away by the floodwater. “We had sensors and monitoring stations, but they were not being monitored extensively,” one said. “Because we were unaware, we couldn’t check when they failed.”
Officials said there was a sense of urgency. “The landscape is adjusting after the mega event, so (it) could trigger a few more landslides,” one of the sources said.
Cameras, sensors and the VSAT will initially be installed at a single site by Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, with more to follow. Officials have already surveyed the area by helicopter to assess placement. Nepal has not formally announced the plans, and both sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter. A spokesperson for the disaster authority did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Note on the casualty figures: the Reuters report puts the toll at “at least 1,114” dead across both countries with nearly 4,000 still missing. That is lower than the 1,127 dead and 4,858 missing reported for Nepal alone by Nepal Police on Wednesday. The two counts have not been reconciled by either source. Search efforts continue at the flooded hydropower tunnels where workers were trapped underground.
