As search-and-rescue operations continue, many with ties to the country are anxiously checking on friends and family and looking for ways to support recovery efforts from thousands of miles away.
"I was so shocked by hearing that news," said Khagendra Karki, who is originally from Kathmandu and has visited the region affected by the disaster.
Karki said the area holds special meaning for him and remains one of his favorite places in Nepal.
"That would be my best destination to go around and hang out with my friends. Beautiful people live out there," he said.
Karki said one of his close friends lost land and livestock in the disaster but escaped without injuries. Many others were not as fortunate. Officials report that foreign nationals and tourists, including as many as 90 Americans, are among the more than 1,300 people still unaccounted for.
"It's heartbreaking," said Dadin Pandey, President of the Nepal Center of North Carolina. "Nepal never expected a catastrophic flood because Nepal is a landlocked country. We never imagined (this). It's hitting like a tsunami."
Pandey said the destruction has affected entire communities.
"It's wiped out towns, villages. It's gone," he said. "Temples, everything which is close to the river."
Videos emerging from the disaster area show residents scrambling to reach safety as floodwaters and debris swept through communities.
"I was crying. Nepal is a small, beautiful country and so peaceful," Pandey said.
"The valley floors are so steep that the water flows incredibly quickly. It's called supercritical flow in the field of engineering, where it flows like it's going down a drain," said Dr. Henri Gavin, the W.H. Gardner Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University.
He explained the disaster differs from many flood events typically seen in Nepal.
"This is a flood that was caused by an avalanche, not by rainfall," Gavin said. "And the normal warning systems in place throughout Nepal are designed to detect rainfall, and then issue warnings based on that."
Gavin's research team, including Duke students, works on developing warning systems for natural disasters in Nepal, including earthquakes and avalanches. He said improving those systems will be important in preventing future tragedies.
"A lot of this is being developed at Duke, to monitor slopes that are potentially susceptible for landslides and to indicate interventions that could prevent those kinds of landslides from happening. But it's very hard to do that in such remote areas. It requires people to be near those sites, accessible, and to be able to observe them in person, but also via satellite, and to combine the satellite imagery with detailed knowledge of how the landslide might possibly occur to indicate the chances of that slip happening and then to perform some kind of intervention," Gavin explained.
For now, however, the emphasis remains on rescue efforts.
"The initial hours and days after an event like this are critical for rescuing people who are trapped or otherwise immobilized. What's very challenging now, especially in this situation, is that the roads have made normal access completely impossible," Gavin said. "People are arriving by helicopter, but it's just not enough throughput to get the number of people on the rescue teams into that area."
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