How Do You Find Someone After A Flood?

In partnership with

It took my feed about ten days to move on from Nepal. Which, by algorithmic standards, is generous.

First came the flood videos — water swallowing highways, bodies in rivers, families recording plea videos begging for information about a missing son, a missing parent, an entire family. Then, slowly, the feed did what feeds do. On September 2, Gloria Steinem died at 92 and my feed filled with essays debating whether she was a good enough feminist. On Sunday, a five-storey PG building collapsed in Delhi's Satya Niketan — students trapped under rubble, a Blinkit ambulance reaching before the state's own, which is its own kind of sentence about the country we live in.

And now, today, my feed has moved on again. People are uploading their faces into ChatGPT to see what they'd look like in the 1980s. Permed hair, shoulder pads, laser-grid studio backdrops.

Maybe that's how we cope. The tragedies don't stop and the visuals are so relentless that we go numb, and then the algorithm offers us an escape hatch in the form of a retro filter, and we take it. I get it.

But I haven't been able to move on from Nepal.

I've spent the last two weeks reading, tracking portals, watching the numbers climb on dashboards. 1,341 confirmed dead. Nearly 5,000 still missing. On 26 August, a glacial lake in Tibet burst and the water — carrying ice, mud, rock — tore down the Bhote Koshi river into Nepal's Rasuwa district and kept going, through Nuwakot, Dhading, Chitwan. 

The videos on my feed went from tsunami-scale waves to individual plea videos. A child looking for parents. An elderly man looking for his son. A woman holding up a photograph, speaking into a phone camera, hoping it reaches someone who knows something. In the comments underneath, people tagged telecom companies, begging them to trace the last tower a phone pinged before it went dark.

I spoke to a few Nepal-based reporters soon after. One of them, a journalist who has been reporting for nearly two decades, told me they are just tired of covering the pain and not being able to give families information.

Between the plea videos, I kept seeing a link being shared — a rescue portal that had come up within hours of the flood, before the government's own.

I reached out to the person who built it.

The civil servant who built a dashboard at 2 am

Niraj Bhusal is an IT officer at Nepal's Ministry of Finance. Digital transformation, AI in government — that's his day job. On the morning of 26 August, he was getting ready for a normal day when news broke that the Rasuwagadhi customs point on the China-Nepal border had been swept away.

"In those first hours, people needed clear, verified information in one place," he told me. "Families, reporters, relatives abroad were searching across many channels." So he built one.

Within hours, Bhusal had a live bulletin running on GitHub — aggregating official alerts, the flood path, damage updates, road conditions, source links. 

He used Grok Bot (xAI) for layout and front-end code. The data pipeline pulls from NDRRMA (the national disaster authority), Nepal Police, the Nepali Army, district administrations, Copernicus satellite imagery, press releases, news reports. The updates arrive roughly every five minutes. What stays human, Bhusal says, is the verification before anything sensitive goes live.

The Rasuwa Flood Bulletin is, as of today, the most comprehensive single-page tracker of the disaster. It runs in Nepali first, then English for the diaspora. It has a live dashboard, a searchable missing-and-found names list, a relief fund tracker (over NPR 7.3 billion raised, plus a $10 million donation from Nvidia), damage assessments from Copernicus satellite data, warehouse inventories, road status, government actions, and a photo archive. 

There's a Google Form where anyone can report a missing person. Bhusal cross-references those submissions against official rescue lists — by hand, and with AI help — to eliminate duplicates.

"What began as a simple Google Form for missing-person tips grew into a fuller dashboard. When the government's official rescue portal was available, I connected visitors from my site toward official state relief and rescue channels."

A few days after Bhusal's bulletin went live, the government launched its own — rescue.opmcm.gov.np — developed by Devs Nepal, a developer community under the Office of the Prime Minister. It has a missing-persons search, a help-request form, emergency contacts, and a donation page routing to the PM's Disaster Relief Fund. 

Separately, Nepal Police launched a database of unidentified dead bodies — photographs and physical descriptions of 1,297 corpses, accessed via a QR code posted on Facebook. Families scan it at hospital noticeboards and scroll through photographs of the dead, looking for someone they recognise. ABC News Australia photographed that scene at Maharajgunj Medical Campus: a woman holding her phone up to a QR code on a hospital wall.

Bhusal is aware that he's a government employee running a citizen site in parallel to the government's own portal. He frames it as complementary, not competing. "The government carries the primary mandate; citizens and civil servants can contribute skills so that mandate reaches people faster and more clearly,” he said.

He wants to hand the bulletin over so it becomes a reusable template — a small piece of public digital infrastructure, as he puts it, not a one-off page.

I asked what shaped how he built it. This wasn't his first disaster. During the 2015 earthquake, Bhusal was at Tribhuvan International Airport and customs, supporting logistics for international relief.

"Those years taught me that information systems are part of disaster response, not an afterthought."

Since then, he completed an AI Fellowship with Perplexity and used the access to train over 100 Nepali civil servants on practical AI for government work. He helped form GovTech Nepal — a community inside the bureaucracy focused on digital tools for public service. He's contributed to Nepal's National AI Policy Draft. The flood bulletin, he told me, was "a stress test" of that whole idea: build fast, stay accountable to official sources, design for citizens first, leave something the state can adopt.

I asked about the tips that came in on WhatsApp and email. One stuck with him.

"One early message I still remember was a short tip about someone last known at a hotel on 26 August, with a request for a contact number so relatives could keep searching. Those human details are why the work felt urgent at 2 am."

I asked how he kept the data clean — open tip channels invite incomplete and duplicate entries, and in a disaster this size, the potential for manipulation is real.

The cost of searching

While Bhusal verifies data from his desk, families have been doing something far more gruelling. 

The reporters I spoke to described relatives of the missing scattered across Nepal — moving from hospital morgues to rescue centres to police stations to army camps, carrying photographs in their pockets. Some have travelled hundreds of kilometres. They don't know whether their relatives were swept downstream, buried under debris, or remain trapped in one of the hydropower tunnels along the Trishuli river where over 900 workers are still unaccounted for.

Nepal Police has opened DNA sample collection at two sites — Kathmandu and Nuwakot — for families trying to identify remains. The country used to process about 8 to 10 forensic identification cases a year. It's now building a database from over 2,400 samples. The full process will take an estimated three months. 

Meanwhile, drones — thermal cameras, LiDAR, and by the second week, cargo drones retrieving bodies — are operating across terrain that rescue teams can't reach on foot. Nepal has four or five heavy-payload drones in the entire country.

And into all of this, scammers moved in within 48 hours. A 32-year-old was arrested for using ChatGPT to generate a fake donation receipt, pasting his own QR code onto it, and sharing it on social media. A group of friends searching for a missing 22-year-old was targeted on WhatsApp by someone who had impersonated the missing person.

Nepal didn't have most of this on August 25. No rescue portal. No DNA database. No drone network. No missing-persons registry. No unified donation infrastructure. 

Two weeks later, all of it exists — some built by the government, some by volunteers like Bhusal coding on GitHub after their day jobs, some by families cross-checking hospital lists in Facebook groups, a citizen site called lostinnepal.org aggregating official registers, drone pilots coordinating on social media.

None of it should have had to be built in a scramble.

The early warning sensors, the hydrological monitoring station on the Bhote Koshi — the infrastructure that was supposed to prevent this — was swept away in the first hours. The head of NDRRMA told journalists their primary station was destroyed on day one. Replacing it requires the consent of both Nepal and China.

Toward the end of his email to me, Bhusal wrote: "Responsible AI in government is not only about models — it is about verification, public trust, and the civil servant's duty to serve people under pressure."

It's a good line. But I keep thinking about the fact that it came from a man who had to build a disaster dashboard on his own time because nothing like it existed when the water hit. 

By the time you read this, your feed will probably have moved on. In Nepal, thousands of families are still refreshing the missing portals. 

On My Bookmarks

Got a story to share or something interesting from your social media feed? Drop me a line, and I might highlight it in my next newsletter.

See you in your inbox, every other Wednesday at 12 pm!

You're Invited: Investing Moves to Boost After-Tax Returns

You've worked hard to fund your portfolio — your investment strategy should work just as hard to maximize your after-tax returns.

On September 17, join Range's CFPs and CPAs live for the practical moves that put more of your returns back in your pocket.

What we'll cover:

• Investment moves to maximize your after-tax returns

• How tax-loss harvesting can lower the taxes you owe

• When direct indexing works (and when it doesn't)

• How to build a diversified portfolio that reduces tax drag.

Range is all-in-one AI wealth management — tax, investments, retirement, and estate in one place. Bring your questions for the live Q&A. Free to attend, and seats are limited.

Reserve your spot today

^{This webinar is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Range defines "high earners" as households with income over $300k.}

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe