On 26 August 2026, flash floods devastated Nepal’s Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha and Tanahun Districts along the Nepal-Tibet border. At least 84,270 people, including 32,000 children, have been affected. Over 1,300 people have reportedly died, and thousands more are still missing. Nepali and international journalists went to extraordinary lengths to cover this tragedy and provide accurate accounts of events as they unfolded, as rescue efforts were still ongoing and most of the affected regions were cut off from the rest of the world. Prabesh Subedi, co-Vice President, with Rajneesh Bhandari, of AAJA-Asia’s Nepal subchapter, relates here his own experience of reporting about Nepal’s disaster from the field.
Covering a human tragedy is always challenging. You do not want to cause further pain by asking survivors questions that may force them to relive their trauma. At the same time, you need to tell a powerful story to the world, in the voices of those who experienced it, to convey the scale of the loss and the depth of human suffering. And you know that your reporting matters: it can put pressure on authorities and the international community to act quickly, potentially helping people who are still waiting for rescue and support.
On August 26, Ramy Inocencio, former president of AAJA-Asia and a CBS News foreign correspondent, called and asked if I could join the CBS team covering the devastating flash floods in Nepal. I did not need much time to decide –“I would be pleased to join”.
Within an hour of the team landing in Kathmandu, we were at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, one of the allocated hospitals receiving flood victims. The area was crowded with people desperately waiting for news of their loved ones. Every time an ambulance entered through the main gate, people moved closer, hoping that someone they were waiting for had been rescued. For a few, the ambulance brought good news. For many others, the waiting continued.
Ramy and producer Barney Smith prepared for a live report while I spoke with survivors and their relatives. Some could barely answer my questions in words, but their frightened and desperate faces said much more.
Reaching the disaster zone presented another challenge. Major roads built along the river had been washed away, cutting off towns and villages. We took narrow alternative roads, climbing steep hills and descending through difficult terrain, eventually reaching Trishuli, one of the hardest-hit areas.
With roads blocked, electricity cut and telecommunications towers down, large parts of the affected region were virtually unreachable. At Bidur, we saw coordinated search-and-rescue operations involving the Nepal Army and other security agencies. Their effort was impressive, but so was the scale of disaster and challenge confronting them.
Helicopters were often the only way to reach communities across the roughly 70-kilometre disaster zone. Even then, rescuers faced a shortage of suitable landing areas, narrow valleys, difficult terrain and unpredictable weather that severely limited flights.
For us as journalists, obtaining reliable information became one of the biggest challenges. Even government officials were struggling to reconcile conflicting information coming from isolated areas. We often had to contact multiple sources simply to verify a single piece of information. The sources and methods we would normally rely on were no longer enough.
Some of the most powerful accounts came directly from survivors. We met people who described how they escaped the flood, climbed to higher ground and survived in forests until rescuers reached them. One young man stood above what had been his home. There was barely any evidence that a house had ever stood there. He told us that the entire neighborhood where he had grown up simply no longer existed.
Reporting under those conditions required much more than interviewing and filming. We were constantly reaching out to sources, verifying information, scripting, translating, coordinating with the news desk and searching for places with enough cellular connectivity to transmit footage or conduct live reports. Sometimes finding a usable mobile signal itself felt like an achievement, and sending large video files could take hours.
There was hardly enough time to sleep, eat or rest. But it was a remarkable team effort. Together, we produced multiple television broadcasts, digital stories and social media reports, some of which reached millions of people.
For me, the experience was also a reminder of what disaster journalism demands. Being at ground zero gives you access to stories and voices that cannot be understood from a distance. But being there also brings responsibility: to verify before reporting, to respect people at their most vulnerable, and to tell their stories without turning their suffering into spectacle.
Story by Prabesh Subedi.