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

[Christian de Larrinaga]

If you need sourcing of supplies or help in contacting help in or from
the UK or access to IT resources. Get in touch. Our chapter like yours
is not set up for disaster relief but we can call for volunteers and I
can personally identify and contact agencies that are experts.

Clearly Brits are very concerned for our brothers and sisters in
Nepal and surrounding affected areas of this disaster. 


best


Christian




Ananda Gautam via Chapter-delegates <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org> writes:

> 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 
>
> [4. application/pdf; OIN_Public Statement _ Rasuwa Flood_ ISOC.pdf]...
>
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-- 
Christian de Larrinaga