A flash flood seems to have swept away homes, bridges and trekking trails along the Budhi Gandaki River in central Nepal early on Sunday, October 11, local time. A major river flooded, sweeping away houses and bridges and damaging part of a hydropower station, authorities said, according to BBC News. The Nepali Army said it rescued 95 people, including nine foreigners, along the river in Gorkha district, BBC News and The Kathmandu Post report. Five people remain missing, the BBC reports, and police gave the same figure to the Post. The preliminary reports confirmed no deaths or injuries, according to The Rising Nepal, a daily published by the government-owned Gorkhapatra Corporation.

The surge seems to have begun before dawn. The Rising Nepal reports that the flood started at around 4:30 a.m. after a landslide reportedly blocked a stream feeding the river system at Philim. Residents of riverside settlements including Chumling and Lokpa fled their homes after hearing loud roaring from the streams from around 4 a.m., The Kathmandu Post reported on Sunday. Ganesh Karki of Jagatbagar told the Post that he and other residents took shelter about 500 meters uphill after a warning call early in the morning. “We never imagined a flood of this size,” he said, in remarks BBC News also carried. BBC News reports that the flood hit as communities prepared to mark the first day of the Dashain festival.

Who raised the alarm first seems disputed. Dharmaraj Uprety, chief executive of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), told Kantipur that authorities received official information about the flood at around 6:20 a.m. and sent SMS alerts to downstream areas 20 minutes later, giving residents time to reach safer ground, according to The Kathmandu Post. A separate Post report gives a different picture: resident Suna Gurung of Jagatbagar got a warning call from a caller in Ghattekhola at around 4:45 a.m., the police post in Arughat issued the first official warning at 5:30 a.m., and mass SMS alerts went out at 6:40 a.m., nearly two hours after locals had already alerted one another, the Post says. Rajan Bhattarai, spokesperson for the Flood Forecasting Division, told the Post: “We sent SMS alerts to upper-belt residents between 6:30 am and 6:40 am, while messages to lower regions were dispatched only after 9:00 am.”

The scale of the damage seems unsettled, and the counts differ by source. Nepal’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said more than 200 homes suffered damage and more than 650 people felt the impact, and that the flood swept away about a dozen houses and several suspension bridges, BBC News reports. The Kathmandu Post, citing preliminary assessments, reports 45 houses completely destroyed and 27 partially damaged, and says two motorable bridges, two suspension bridges, three hydropower projects and 34 livestock sheds reportedly suffered damage. Nima Lama, chairman of Chumnubri Rural Municipality, told The Rising Nepal the flood swept away an estimated 35 to 40 houses, while the municipality’s administrative chief, Narayan Prasad Sapkota, told the Post that 31 houses went in Chumnubri alone.

The river rose fast. Within a couple of hours, water levels at one location climbed from two meters to nearly 8.5m, officials told BBC News; Uprety told Kantipur that the level at Arughat reached 8.3 meters against a danger level of around five meters, the Post reports. Binod Parajuli, a meteorologist who works with the Nepalese government, told the BBC: “Our hydrological station was swept away and we are not getting any data from that location.” The 341-megawatt Budhigandaki semi-reservoir project under construction in Salleri lost equipment and its construction camp suffered damage, The Kathmandu Post reports, and The Rising Nepal says the developer, Times Energy, saw its main camp area, buildings and construction equipment swept away.

Northern Gorkha now seems reachable mainly by air. “The entire rural municipality is now cut off, with air travel the only remaining way to reach it,” Sapkota told the Post. The flood struck in the peak autumn trekking season on the Manaslu route, the Post reports. Bhuwan Ojha, information officer of the Manaslu Conservation Area Project, told the Post that around 115 tourists stayed in Jagat and 40 in Lokpa. “Tourists are staying where they were. They are safe,” he said. The Gorkha Road Project has begun arranging Bailey bridge components from Hetauda to replace the swept-away motorable bridge linking Arughat in Gorkha with Dhading, The Rising Nepal reports. Prime Minister Balen Shah announced in a Facebook post that the army had airlifted six people from the landslide-prone Jagat area, according to OnlineKhabar.

What caused the surge remains unclear. The NDRRMA has provisionally attributed the flooding to landslide debris from the Ungilung stream, which blocked the Syarkhola before the accumulated water burst through, though the exact cause remains unconfirmed, The Kathmandu Post reports. BBC News reports that some say a landslide may have dammed the river or a tributary, while others say locals upstream saw an ice avalanche. The flood came less than two months after the August floods along the Nepal-Tibet border, the Post notes; BBC News puts that toll at more than 1,400 dead and thousands missing in one passage and at hundreds killed in another, and the Post says the Bhotekoshi floods killed hundreds and left thousands missing. Save the Children has begun mobilising an emergency team, BBC News reports. “Children's lives have been ripped apart in an instant yet again,” said Tara Chettry, the charity’s director in Nepal.