In Nepal’s flood-ravaged Devighat, crossing the Trishuli River was once an ordinary part of daily life. Now it can mean climbing into a makeshift carrier suspended from a cable and being pulled high above the water.
The bridges are gone.
Roads have been ripped apart. Homes have been reduced to mud-covered ruins. Across the landscape lie fragments of the lives that existed here before the August 26 disaster: shoes, suitcases, furniture and other belongings scattered among silt and debris.
Yet Devighat has not been completely cut off.
A simple zipline stretched across the river has become an unlikely lifeline, carrying residents, volunteers and supplies between communities separated when catastrophic floodwaters swept away the infrastructure connecting them.
It is a striking image from one of Nepal’s worst natural disasters in recent years. But it also tells a bigger story. Long after the initial flood has passed, thousands of survivors are discovering that staying alive is only the first stage of a disaster. The next challenge is rebuilding the connections that make everyday life possible.
A River Now Divides the Community
Devighat, in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, was among the communities devastated by the massive flooding that struck the Himalayan nation on August 26.
The Trishuli River surged with extraordinary force, destroying homes, roads and bridges and leaving communities on opposite banks isolated from one another.
In places where bridges once provided routine crossings, residents now face a dangerous barrier.
The improvised answer is remarkably basic.
A cable has been stretched across the river, creating a makeshift zipline that allows people to cross one at a time.
For residents, it is more than an improvised transportation system. It provides access to family members, relief supplies and communities that would otherwise be extraordinarily difficult to reach.
The Zipline Has Become Part of Everyday Survival
Footage from the area shows residents using the suspended system to travel across the swollen river while others help operate it from the banks.
There is little about the journey that resembles normal transportation.
Passengers are carried above the river with few of the protections associated with permanent infrastructure. Yet when bridges have disappeared and roads are unusable, the alternative may involve long and difficult journeys or simply remaining cut off.
Similar scenes have emerged elsewhere in Nuwakot. Associated Press reporting from Bidur documented residents relying on makeshift ziplines after floodwaters severed normal routes across the Trishuli.
The unusual crossing captures how quickly disaster can redefine what counts as essential infrastructure.
A bridge may take months or years to rebuild. A cable can be installed much faster.
For the moment, that difference matters enormously.
Survival Does Not End With Rescue
The dramatic first days after a disaster naturally focus on rescue operations, missing people and casualty figures.
But Devighat reveals the less visible stage that follows.
Survivors still need medicine. They need food, clean water and shelter. Children eventually need to return to school. Workers need to reach jobs. Families need to travel between communities.
When roads and bridges disappear, every one of those ordinary activities becomes more difficult.
Across Nepal’s flood zone, more than 4,500 displaced people were staying in dozens of relief centers, according to AP reporting earlier this week.
Some survivors have struggled to obtain cash and medicine even where food assistance is available.
That illustrates a critical reality of disaster recovery: having relief supplies somewhere in a region does not necessarily mean people can easily reach what they need.
Nepal’s Flood Disaster Is Enormous
The destruction in Devighat forms only one small part of a much larger catastrophe.
The August 26 floods were likely triggered by a glacier collapse and sent enormous quantities of water, mud and debris through Himalayan valleys.
Reuters reported on September 5 that at least 1,344 people had been confirmed dead in Nepal, while 4,887 remained missing.
The disaster has devastated communities and damaged major infrastructure, including hydropower facilities.
Rescuers are still searching areas where workers became trapped underground.
Remarkably, people have continued to emerge alive days after the disaster.
Ten days after the floods, rescuers pulled Chinese worker Lu Haitao alive from a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project. Two Nepali workers had been rescued from another tunnel a day earlier.
Those rescues have provided rare moments of hope amid an enormous humanitarian crisis.
A Landscape Almost Erased
The physical scale of the destruction is difficult to understand from casualty numbers alone.
Reuters reporting from the Trishuli River valley described entire settlements reduced to expanses of mud and debris.
Syabrubesi, one of the devastated communities, was left almost unrecognizable.
The flood also destroyed the Gyirong border crossing between Nepal and China, demonstrating how the disaster affected not only villages but important transportation and commercial infrastructure.
In Devighat, the evidence is visible everywhere.
Damaged homes stand amid mud. Personal possessions are buried in silt. The ordinary geography of the community has changed because familiar roads and crossings no longer exist.
For survivors, recovery therefore means more than rebuilding individual houses. It means rebuilding the network connecting those houses to everything else.
The Nepal Army Starts Reconnecting Devighat
There are signs that temporary infrastructure is beginning to replace emergency improvisation.
The Nepali Army has started constructing a makeshift bridge in Devighat as authorities attempt to restore connectivity to communities devastated by the flood.
Temporary bridges are especially important because they can reopen routes for more than pedestrians.
Once vehicles and relief teams can move more freely, transporting construction equipment, food, water and medical supplies becomes significantly easier.
But temporary infrastructure is only the beginning.
Nepal faces a huge reconstruction challenge involving roads, bridges, homes, electricity systems and hydropower facilities.
The Disaster Has Created Mountains of Debris
Another major obstacle is the sheer volume of material left behind.
Reuters reported that the floods generated an estimated 2.2 million tons of debris.
That matters because reconstruction cannot simply begin everywhere at once.
Roads must first be cleared. Damaged areas need to be assessed. Unstable ground can remain dangerous. Heavy machinery must somehow reach communities where the transportation network itself has been destroyed.
In some rescue areas, teams have needed to manually clear obstacles and use controlled blasting to reach people believed to be trapped inside hydropower tunnels.
Recovery in such terrain will be neither quick nor straightforward.
A Climate Warning From the Himalayas
The disaster is also renewing questions about the vulnerability of Himalayan communities as the climate changes.
Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah has called international attention to the country’s exposure to climate-related disasters following the suspected glacier collapse.
Mountain regions face a complicated combination of hazards.
Glaciers are changing. Steep terrain can accelerate floodwaters. Settlements and infrastructure are often concentrated along river valleys because mountainous geography leaves limited space for development.
Hydropower projects, roads and bridges are essential to economic development, but many are also located in environments exposed to landslides, floods and other geological hazards.
The destruction along the Trishuli demonstrates what happens when several of those vulnerabilities collide.
A Zipline Tells the Bigger Story
Against statistics involving thousands of dead and missing people, a makeshift zipline might appear to be a small detail.
It is not.
It represents one of the fundamental challenges Nepal now faces.
Disasters destroy connections as well as buildings.
A washed-away bridge can separate a patient from medicine, a farmer from a market, a rescue team from survivors or a family from relatives living just across a river.
Restoring those connections is therefore central to recovery.
In Devighat, residents are not waiting for permanent infrastructure to return. They are adapting with what they have.
For now, a cable hanging above the Trishuli River is doing the work once performed by a bridge.
From Emergency Rescue to a Long Recovery
Nepal’s attention remains focused on finding the missing, rescuing anyone who may still be trapped and caring for thousands of displaced survivors.
But another phase of the disaster has already begun.
It is the slower and less dramatic process of rebuilding.
Bridges must return. Roads must reopen. Homes must be reconstructed. Hydropower infrastructure needs to be assessed. Communities separated by the flood need to be physically connected again.
Devighat’s zipline offers an extraordinary symbol of that transition.
It shows both the severity of what was lost and the determination of people to restore some form of normal life before permanent reconstruction arrives.
The flood took away the bridges.
For the moment, a single cable is helping hold the community together.