Several hundred people gathered in Jubilee Square on Friday evening to remember those killed in Nepal’s worst disaster since the 2015 earthquake — a wall of ice and rock that fell for three-quarters of a mile, then ran a hundred kilometres down two rivers lined with villages and power stations.
Candles were lit in Jubilee Square on Friday evening as several hundred people gathered in the centre of Maidstone to remember the victims of the flooding that has devastated central Nepal.
The vigil, held from 6.30pm, was organised to stand in solidarity with the Nepalese community, to honour those affected by the disaster and to offer support, Maidstone Borough Council said in a media advisory issued the day before.
The vigil
Several hundred people filled the square, from the memorial table at the top down to the crowd standing along the High Street outside the Muggleton Inn. Nepal’s flag flew beside a Union flag over a table draped with a Maidstone Gurkha Nepalese Community banner and set with white flowers, candles and a framed photograph.
Tea lights had been laid out in rows across the paving. As the light went, people came forward in ones and twos, knelt, and lit them, until the centre of the square was lit end to end. A Buddhist monk in maroon robes stood beside the table. Civic representatives from the borough attended, standing among residents and families in traditional Nepali dress, several of the older men wearing the dhaka topi.
How the flood began
On the morning of Tuesday 26 August, part of a glacier cliff on the north face of Langtang Lirung — a peak of about 7,200 metres some 60 kilometres north of Kathmandu — broke away. A section of ice roughly 0.2 square kilometres in area detached at about 5.2 kilometres above sea level and fell around 1.2 kilometres, close to three-quarters of a mile, straight down. A significant section of the bedrock beneath the ice failed with it.
The impact released energy the United States Geological Survey put at the equivalent of a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. This was not an earthquake that caused a collapse: the USGS found the seismic signal did not precede the fall but was generated by it. What the mountain sent down instead was a debris flow, and it travelled roughly 100 kilometres into the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi rivers.
The collapse was not entirely without precursor. Satellite analysis found the glacier had been creeping at about 10 millimetres a month from early January, and that the rate accelerated in the weeks before it gave way. Nobody was reading those images in time to act on them.
The wider context is a warming one, and is best stated carefully. The first three weeks of August were the warmest in the local record, averaging 9.25C against 9.12C for the whole of August 2022, the previous high. Warming thaws the permafrost that binds high rock and ice together, and researchers regard that as raising the likelihood of collapses of this kind. That is a statement about the loading of the dice, not a claim that this particular block fell on this particular morning because of it.
What stood in its path
The scale of the death toll is not explained by the collapse alone. It is explained by what had been built along the two rivers below it.
The Trishuli and the Bhote Koshi run through steep, narrow corridors with very little flat land. That is where the villages are, and it is also where Nepal has concentrated a great deal of its hydropower — plants, substations, access roads and worker accommodation, built beside the water because there is nowhere else to put them.
The Nepal Electricity Authority said 13 hydropower projects were damaged, among them Rasuwagadhi, Chilime, Trishuli 3A, the Trishuli 3B substation, Trishuli Hydropower Station and Devighat. It put the loss from operating plants at 431 megawatts, with a further 470 megawatts of projects under construction damaged; reporting on 31 August put the total off the grid at around 700 megawatts, close to a tenth of Nepal’s generating capacity. The Independent Power Producers’ Association, Nepal said up to 900 workers from a dozen projects were unaccounted for, with hundreds believed to have been trapped in tunnels.
The warning question is the hardest of them. The flood was picked up at the China–Nepal border and moved so fast from its source that there was almost no warning time upstream. Downstream was different. The researcher Jakob Steiner has pointed out that there was still time as the flood travelled towards the hydropower sites — which leaves the question of whether an alert could have reached the men working in those tunnels, and why it did not.
Ramraj Narasimhan, a senior director at the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, has framed the lesson as one of redundancy: better siting, alternative routes, backup power and early-warning systems that actually reach the people at risk. Analysts including Steiner and Himanshu Thakkar have argued that environmental and disaster-risk assessments have to reflect the particular valley and what has happened in it before, rather than being completed as a formality.
What is known of the toll
Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said on 3 September that at least 1,259 people had died, 5,083 were missing and more than 5,000 had been injured. Nearly 1.6 million people have been affected and around 8,317 houses destroyed. It is Nepal’s deadliest natural disaster since the earthquake of April 2015.
The dead and missing include people from well beyond Nepal. As of 2 September, 590 foreign nationals from 39 countries were among those listed as missing, and only a small fraction of the bodies recovered had been formally identified.
The Kent connection
Maidstone’s link to Nepal is a long one. Invicta Park Barracks in the town is the home of 36 Engineer Regiment, which includes 69 and 70 Gurkha Field Squadrons of the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers. Gurkha soldiers who have joined the regiment since 1994 have been based at Maidstone for their entire careers, with their families settled in the town, and Kent has one of the largest Nepalese populations in the country.
It is why a disaster 4,500 miles away is not a distant story in this town. The families standing in Jubilee Square on Friday were not marking someone else’s loss.
How to help
The UK government announced a £5 million response package for the most urgent humanitarian needs in Nepal, and has directed people in Britain who want to help to the appeal run by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Its advice is to give money rather than goods: cash can be moved quickly to where it is needed, while unsolicited items can block the roads and warehouses that relief agencies need. It also advises checking any appeal against the official charity register before donating.
Sources
- Maidstone Borough Council, media advisory, “Candlelight Vigil for Victims of Nepal Floods”, 3 September 2026, and the council’s accompanying Facebook post.
- Kent Local News, reporting and photographs from Jubilee Square, Maidstone, 4 September 2026.
- GOV.UK, Nepal-China floods: what you can do to help, 31 August 2026.
- United States Geological Survey, seismic analysis of the Langtang Lirung collapse.
- ABC News, Nepal floods expose risks to hydropower in a warming Himalayas, 31 August 2026 — Nepal Electricity Authority and Independent Power Producers’ Association figures, and comment from Jakob Steiner, Ramraj Narasimhan and Himanshu Thakkar.
- The Climate Brink, What we can and cannot say about climate change and the Nepal disaster.
- UN News, Nepal flooding deaths surpass 900 as needs climb.
- Al Jazeera, reporting on the Nepal-Tibet flood toll, 30 August to 2 September 2026.
- The British Army, 36 Engineer Regiment and the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers.