There is no peace for Nepal. After the devastating flood at the end of August that killed over 1,200 people on the border with Tibet, the mountain nation is once again grappling with an emergency. This time it’s the monsoons: a late tailwind of the rainy season that is causing floods and landslides across Nepal, India, Myanmar and Thailand. The most impressive images come, once again, from the Nepalese mountains, where a video that quickly went viral shows the collapse of an entire mountain slope in the space of a few seconds, which occurred in the Chame area, in the centre-north of the country.
An entire mountain collapsed into the Kaligandaki River in Nepal pic.twitter.com/hlE6BVQ5FF
— Surajit (@surajit_ghosh2) September 28, 2026
The body count
The very heavy rains of the last 72 hours have caused extensive damage and dozens of deaths in the four Asian nations. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh alone, the death toll linked to bad weather ranges between 56 and 62 people, with hundreds injured and around a thousand homes destroyed or irreparably damaged. At the same time, the Nepalese civil protection authorities have confirmed the death of at least 21 people (the latest updates also speak of 24-27 deaths) due to landslides and landslides along the hilly and mountainous area, while several individuals are still missing.
The heavy rainfall did not spare other areas of the region. In the Indian state of Odisha, the level of watercourses exceeded the warning thresholds, requiring the precautionary evacuation of over 75,000 residents from areas at greatest hydrogeological risk. Further east, floods have also hit hard in Myanmar and Thailand, where floods have hit numerous provinces, causing major infrastructure disruption.
Huge mountainside collapse in Manang has sent debris rushing toward the Marsyangdi River, raising fears of a potentially destructive mud flood downstream in Nepal pic.twitter.com/9SKcMzsoNp
— Surajit (@surajit_ghosh2) September 28, 2026
Meteorological causes
The genesis of the incessant monsoon rains of recent days is linked to the formation of an atmospheric depression over the Bay of Bengal, which subsequently advanced towards the interior of the Indian subcontinent, discharging extraordinary volumes of water compared to seasonal averages. In Uttar Pradesh, weather stations recorded around 66.5 millimeters of rain over three days, compared to a historical average of just 7.6 millimeters for the same time frame.
What makes such storm events so devastating is precisely the temporal concentration of precipitation: when enormous quantities of water rapidly penetrate already saturated or geologically fragile terrain, the pressure increases until it exceeds the mechanical resistance of the mountain slopes. This process leads to the rapid sliding of rock and debris masses downstream, as documented in the recent structural collapses of Nepalese mountain walls.
Environmental impacts
The combined effect of floods and landslides is significantly altering the morphology of local hydrological basins. The destruction of bridges, roads and containment works also complicates rescue operations and isolates mountain communities. While the run-off of agricultural land risks causing significant damage to crops, threatening the food production of an area already severely affected by the extreme events of the previous month.
Already in August, on the occasion of the collapse of the ice on the border between Nepal and Tibet, experts had warned that climate change is profoundly modifying the region, increasing the frequency of extreme events previously considered rare and unpredictable. The intensification of monsoon rainfall, combined with the intrinsic fragility of recently formed mountain ranges, will require in the coming years an enhancement of real-time monitoring systems and territorial planning capable of predicting the impact of increasingly concentrated and destructive meteorological events. Especially in a country like Nepal, which makes tourism one of its main economic drivers.