A California mother of two narrowly escaped a massive landslide flood in Nepal this month after she ordered her husband off a bus seconds before a wall of water and mud engulfed it. As of Friday, 584 people had been reported dead and more than 2,400 remained missing, according to Nepal's National Disaster Management Authority and the Chinese government.
Anjana Raja told ABC News she had dreamed of traveling to Nepal since she was a teenager, drawn by a spiritual journey to Mount Kailash. When she and her husband, Pattabiraman Venkatesan, finally made the trip, they were on a bus heading toward the Chinese border on Wednesday when the driver and front passengers suddenly fled the vehicle.
Raja saw the reason immediately. "It was water mixed with the mud that was a good 50 to 60 feet high. It stood like a serpent right there staring at us," she told ABC News. "Like a cobra's head staring at you."
She did not wait. She grabbed her sling bag, seized her husband by the collar, and told him to run. "I didn't even give time to act. I just said, 'Leave the bus right away or we're gonna die,'" Raja said.
The couple and other bus passengers sprinted to a camp adjacent to the bus and began climbing toward higher ground as the water hit and flooded the streets. "We just blindly...climbed. We didn't even know what direction ... There was no guide for us, there was nobody, we were just frantically running. Running, literally running. It was slushy, it was muddy, we were climbing rocks, which was slippery. We just ran for our life," she said.
They reached the second level of the camp and Raja watched the water move their bus. "I told my husband 'That's it, we're gone. We're going to die,'" she said. They kept climbing to a third level, where the water never reached them, though they could see it sweeping vehicles, objects, and people away below. "It just came like a roar, it sucked a bunch of buses, SUVs, people, the basecamp, everything -- took it in, turned it, turned it all upside down and dumped it into the ground," Raja said.
From that position the couple watched the destruction pass beneath them. Eventually they were able to reach their daughter Amanda, a physician in California, and have remained in contact with her since. Search and rescue operations were continuing as of Friday.
