# barrier lake  

A year after the barrier lake on Matai'an Creek burst and sent mud and rock through the township of Guangfu in eastern Taiwan, killing 19 people, the lake that produced the disaste......

On August 26, 2026, shortly after 8:37 a.m., a slab of rock and glacier ice broke off the north face of Langtang Lirung, a 7,227-meter peak in Nepal's Rasuwa district near the Chin......

On August 26, 2026, shortly after 8:37 a.m., a slab of rock and glacier ice broke off the north face of Langtang Lirung, a 7,227-meter peak in Nepal's Rasuwa district near the Chinese border. The front of the flow it became averaged about 190 kilometers per hour over its first 22 kilometers. Nepal's flood forecasting division sent text alerts to some 679,000 people 38 minutes after the collapse; Timure, the settlement nearest the border, had less warning time than anywhere downstream and went under. By September 12, 1,429 people were confirmed dead across Nepal and Tibet and 5,649 were still missing. Nepal's national planning commission and its disaster authority put the rebuilding bill at US$4.73 billion.

A year after the Matai'an Creek barrier lake gave way and buried Guangfu Township in black silt, the mud is out of Hualien's homes and classrooms but not out of the township. It now sits beside Provincial Highway 9 in tarpaulin-covered mounds four and five stories high, drying into dust that blows back into the schools it was dug out of. The deeper problem is who paid for the recovery: companies, temples, alumni associations and strangers moved first, while budgeted public works are still moving through procedure.