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

Thu Aug 27 10:13:50 PDT 2026

Dear Ananda,

I am following the news of the floods in Nepal, and my thoughts are with
you and the community during this serious situation.

Having recently experienced two major earthquakes in Venezuela on June 24,
which resulted in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, our chapter had to
mobilize quickly. I documented some of our experiences in these articles:

  - https://blog.lacnic.net/en/internet-earthquakes-venezuela/
  -
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2026/07/connectivity-is-a-lifeline-in-venezuelas-humanitarian-emergency/

To answer your questions based on our experience:

1. What did your chapter actually do, concretely, and at what point in the
timeline did you do it?

  - Hours after the event: We established an emergency WhatsApp group with
senior regional and national experts to assess the situation.
Simultaneously, I contacted the president of our main ISP chamber to get a
summary of the damage to the infrastructure.
  - Initial response: Working with our regional Internet Society manager,
we purchased emergency connectivity kits (Starlink antennas, EcoFlow
batteries, and solar panels) through an NGO in Colombia and had them in our
hand 4 days after the quakes.
  - Ongoing deployment: We have deployed nearly 80 Starlink antennas. These
initially served rescue teams, then displaced populations, and are now
supporting affected rural communities that lost all connectivity and also
displaced major encampments.

2. Who did you work with, and did that relationship exist before the crisis
or did you build it during?

  - Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF): They provided incredible support. If
the Red Cross is active in Nepal, TSF will likely deploy with them. You can
reach out to them at https://www.tsfi.org/.
  - SpaceX: They donated 60 antennas and a free disaster recovery plan. You
can contact them at StarlinkCrisisResponse at spacex.com.
  - Established relationships: Chapter volunteers, local digital rights and
access NGOs, and presidents of technology and ISP chambers.
  - Relationships built/strengthened during the crisis: The Red Cross,
various UN agencies (UNHCR, IOM, UNDP), major humanitarian NGOs, and local
religious leaders, who helped identify responsible community members to
manage the equipment.

3. What did you try that did not work, or could not be attempted at all,
and what was the binding constraint?

  - Working with official telecommunications authorities proved ineffective
due to heavy bureaucracy, which stalled rapid response efforts.

4 & 5. Technical resilience and recommendations for regulators/operators:

  - Due to the total destruction of core infrastructure, cellular companies
partnered with SpaceX to implement Direct-to-Cell (D2D) technology. This
allowed the public to access free SMS and calling services for the first 30
days following the disaster.

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you need any further help or detail.

Kind regards,

Ale Stolk

Presidenta de Internet Society Venezuela
Jefe de Redes y Conectividad
Dirección de Telecomunicaciones y Servicios
Universidad de Los Andes
+584123700021 (cel)

On Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:42 PM Ananda Gautam via Chapter-delegates <
chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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