Dozens dead & hundreds missing in flash flood at Nepal-China border

Yeah, in the breaking news, these devastating flash floods in Nepal near the Chinese border. As of now, we are told at least 31 people are dead, but that number is certain to rise. Hundreds of people we are told are missing, many likely tourists. There is this horrifying new video which illustrates why there is so much concern, why we can say with near certainty this death toll will go up. You just see this wall of water engulfing a town there. The power, the force of that water just carrying so many of the buildings away, sweeping them off their foundations. We saw other images of buses just being tossed around like toy cars. Truly, truly devastating. We've been working to get new information. There are other images coming in as well. Let's get right to CNN's Gage Golding for the latest on what you are seeing and learning about this. You know, I think you kind of hit the nail right on the head there. That video just kind of grossly underestimates the number of fatalities that we're seeing right now. About 31 is the official count. And you look at this. I mean, just let's walk through this video. You see how tall that building is and you see how small those people are. I mean, that building has to be, you know, what, five, six stories tall. And the water flows over it like it's a small rock dam in a creek, if you will. I mean, it just it's hard to imagine. You know, I was in the Texas Hill Country for the floods there last year. And I remember looking up into these trees and seeing just, wow, the amount of water. This dwarfs that. And not to compare flood to flood, but it just the amount of water is hard to truly understand. And the numbers, again, they are going to change and unfortunately, dramatically increase. But the number of people killed here, 31. There are hundreds missing, including around 400 people. That's according to the Nepal Tourism Board from seven different nations, including the United States, the UK, South Africa, India, Australia, Netherlands. This is a very touristy town. As you can see, those tour buses, they're being pushed away like toy cars. But there's one video I really want to show. And I want you to listen to it because it truly encapsulates what happened in those moments. And I want you to notice that it's in this video. It's nice out. You can see it's sunny. It seems like a beautiful day. And then all of a sudden, this wall of water comes out of nowhere. Please watch this. I mean, the shrieks in their voice, you can only imagine what was going through their mind there. What you see in the beginning of the video is people just standing around, maybe hearing the water rushing down. But they weren't panicking in that moment yet. And then you saw the panic set in. You saw people running. You saw what I could only imagine in the front of that bus was somebody driving as fast as they could to get to higher ground. We don't know the outcome of that video. But we do know some details like this, including around 60 workers, including almost a dozen from South Korea, working on a hydropower plant there, a 20-megawatt plant that they were working on. They are still unaccounted for at this point. So this is all up and down this river gorge here. And you might be wondering, how does something like this happen? I mentioned that it seemed like a beautiful, sun-shining day. And from that video, it truly does. It doesn't look like it was storming or anything like that. From what we have right now, it sounds like there was an earthquake registering about a 4.4 magnitude, according to the USGS, that triggered a landslide that lodged into a river, partially blocked it, and shoved what could only be described as a wall of water down the river into these villages. And as you can see there, it's pretty much a gorge. There's nowhere for this water to go. Except taking everything with it. This is a situation that we're going to continue to follow as these numbers continue to come in. Current death toll, 31, with hundreds missing. But I imagine the next time we talk, we'll have some updated information. Unfortunately, probably not some great information there. Now, Gage, you showed it while you were talking. We saw those buses being swept away there, their prod garage. This is an aerial shot right here, just pointing out. You can see where the floods came in, way overflowing the banks there. I don't know if there were other buildings there that simply got swept away. But you can see how many buildings the water just simply, completely passed through as it swamped that village. Obviously, the video of that school bus, those kids shrieking, is terrifying. The one hopeful thing there is that they seem to have made it through, right? I mean, the video made it through, and the water did not reach those kids. But it is horrifying to hear their shrieks there. Gage, we're going to let you dig for more video and see if you can reach people on the ground there. I want to bring in our meteorologist now, Derek Van Dam, and you'll have been listening to our guest there explaining what he believes may have happened. And it's pretty frightening stuff when you consider what we have just seen. I mean, these images are absolutely devastating. Becky, we're trying to understand it in real time, just like you, just like the individual, the authoritative individual you talked to from the Nepalese government a moment ago. But let's talk about what we know. And let's talk about the cascading hazards that this area is so prone to. We know that this is the monsoon season across Nepal. We know that August is in the height of summer. We've got thousands of glaciers that line the Himalayas across this area. And this part of the world, because of climate change, is warming two times faster than the global average. So what that's doing is accelerating the loss of ice from these glaciers. And what that's doing is causing, or at least creating, these glacial lakes in some very precarious positions high into the mountains of the Himalayas. Now, this is kind of a pool of water, right, that is often formed by these melting glaciers. But it can also be filled by the excessive rain from the monsoon season. So these cascading effects, not to mention an earthquake that was registered in and around the location of this disaster, could have added to this river being dammed up, these glacial lake outbursts, this potential of a glacial lake outbursts just being exacerbated because of these culminating problems that puts over two million people at risk that live in the valleys below across this part of the Nepal and China border. Now, ice loss here since the year 2000 has doubled. So that is one of the concerns here. So when we think about the earthquake that was located right about there, if there was any kind of debris, we're talking ice, we're talking about rock that's been destabilized from the increase in temperatures, the fact that it's still monsoon season and it's likely rained across this area, that obviously destabilizes the ground. And any of that rock and debris falling into the rivers and the gorges below can easily dam up that water. So if we have a glacial lake outburst, if this is indeed the problem, indeed the cause of this deadly flooding, it was made worse by this melt off from glaciers, thanks to monsoon rains, the increased temperatures across the planet, this area warming twice as fast. These are the culminating factors that can lead to these disasters. We've seen it time and time again, a glacial lake outburst that happened last year, similar effects, devastating impacts. And it is very, very scary to not only see these videos, but to live at the base of these towering behemoth mountains.