[Chapter-delegates] Rasuwa flood in Nepal: connectivity as lifeline, and a request for your chapter's experience

[Ananda Gautam]

Dear Chapter Leaders,

Writing from the Internet Society Nepal Chapter,

Earlier today, 26 August 2026, a flash flood on the Bhote Koshi tore
through Timure and Syabrubesi in Rasuwa district on Nepal's northern
border. Hydropower plants, market areas, road links and the Timure helipad
have been destroyed or badly damaged, and districts downstream along the
Trishuli are on alert. The cause is not yet confirmed. The human toll is
still being established, so I will not circulate figures that are changing
by the hour. Search and rescue is ongoing as I write.

Our chapter has issued a public statement, attached. In short: condolences
and recognition of the responders; appreciation for the free communication
services announced by the Ministry of Communication and Information
Technology and by the operators; and an argument that telecommunications
and Internet infrastructure are themselves emergency infrastructure, not a
convenience that can be restored after the roads and the power. When fibre,
backhaul, electricity and roads fail at the same moment, coordination of
the response fails with them.

I want to be honest about why I am writing to this list rather than simply
circulating a statement.

We do not have a worked-out disaster response capability, and I suspect
that is true of a good number of chapters. When 26 platforms were blocked
here in September 2025 and national traffic dropped by around half, we
responded with advocacy, because advocacy is what we are built for. A flood
is a different problem. It asks for preparedness work done years earlier,
relationships with the national disaster authority and the regulator that
exist before the emergency rather than after it, and a technical position
on backup power, route redundancy and alternative connectivity that someone
has already written down. We are starting most of that from scratch, in the
middle of it.

So this is a request, not an announcement. If your chapter has been through
a cyclone, an earthquake, a wildfire, a flood, a conflict-driven outage or
a shutdown, I would like to hear:


   1. What did your chapter actually do, concretely, and at what point in
   the timeline did you do it?
   2. Who did you work with, and did that relationship exist before the
   crisis or did you build it during?
   3. What did you try that did not work, or could not be attempted at all,
   and what was the binding constraint: mandate, funding, access, or standing
   with the government?
   4. What has held up technically in your context: community networks,
   emergency roaming, satellite backhaul, backup power, offline content
   caches, something else?
   5. Is there a common set of tasks chapters could put to regulators and
   operators, on restoration priority, emergency roaming, free calling, and
   public transparency about outages?


If there is enough response, I am happy to do the collation work and bring
back a synthesis to this list: what chapters have done, what worked, and
where the recurring gaps are. Not a framework imposed from Kathmandu, just
an organised record of experience that a chapter facing its first disaster
could actually read.

Two threads this would connect to rather than duplicate. The Internet
Society Foundation has been funding Internet resiliency in disaster
response for several years, and chapters that have held those grants will
know far more than we do.

Please reply on the list so others can see the answers.

Best Regards,
Ananda Gautam
Co-Founder,
Open Internet Nepal -  Internet Society Nepal Chapter
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/chapter-delegates/attachments/20260827/d23b4729/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OIN_Public Statement _ Rasuwa Flood_ ISOC.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 221034 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/chapter-delegates/attachments/20260827/d23b4729/attachment-0001.pdf>