Nepal floods: Khalte residents knew the river would come—then it did

Khalte, a settlement close to the bank of the Trishuli River in northern Nepal, was completely destroyed in the flash flooding of late August. Khalte housed around 257 families who had been displaced by a previous disaster, when Nepal was rocked by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2015. I spent time working with families there in September 2019, as part of a research project looking at how renewable energy might improve their lives. This community had spent years living in makeshift homes squeezed between the river and the road, on land that was known to be at risk of flooding. Having lost almost everything in the earthquake, they were scraping…