China could not provide immediate information on Bhotekoshi flood, says Foreign Secretary Rai

Kathmandu, November 2

Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai has said that the Chinese government could not provide immediate information about the Bhotekoshi flood that struck on August 26.

Rai made the remarks at a meeting of the National Assembly’s special parliamentary committee on the study and monitoring of disasters in the Bhotekoshi and Kaligandaki corridors. He said the Chinese side was unable to give Nepal timely notice. He also told the committee that he had drawn the Chinese side’s attention to the matter.

“I think they themselves had not received that information in time to pass it on to their own people. That is what we have understood from the Chinese side. They too would have saved their own people,” Rai said. “The incident appears to have happened so suddenly that there was no time to give warning. What could have been done differently after the fact is a separate matter.”

Rai said the Chinese side told Nepal it could not share information because it had not received any itself. Since the incident took place on the Nepal side, China may also have had no advance notice of the flood, he said. He added that the Chinese side had told him heavy loss of life and property occurred because it could not alert its own citizens in time.

“There probably wasn’t much time there. That is why no immediate warning came. After we received the information, our own police went through the downstream riverside areas with loudspeakers, telling people that a flood was coming and that they should run. But the people living along the river did not believe it at all. They said floods always come, and they did not flee,” Rai said.

He said the nature of the flood and the speed of the event made immediate exchange of information impossible. While it is natural to raise questions after such an incident, there was not enough time to give warning when it happened, Rai said.

“So the information was not shared at that very moment, on that same day. We did not have a mechanism for it either. But I think if they had known earlier, they could at least have saved their own side, and even that did not happen. Everything was swept away all at once,” he said.

Rai said that after Nepal received information about the flood, the Nepal Police were deployed in the lower riverside areas and used loudspeakers to urge locals to move to safe places, but some people ignored the appeal.

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