Residents and rescue workers in flood-ravaged valleys of Nepal faced the threat of a new wave of inundation Friday, as scientists warned that debris had blocked rivers upstream, forming fragile dams ready to burst.

In the narrow upper valleys, Wednesday’s flood wave crested over the tops of buildings and homes. It destroyed everything in its path—hydropower plants, farms, solar energy facilities, roads, forests.

As of Friday afternoon, Nepal time, rescuers had recovered 538 bodies and nearly 1,000 people were missing, according to government reports. The debris flow and flooding traveled downstream more than 60 miles into Nepal’s Rasuwa district, eventually reaching the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems.

Sunil Tamang, a doctoral student studying rock glaciers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, grew up in Syafru Besi, which lies along a popular trekking route and in the path of the flooding. Since the disaster, he’s been speaking with family in Kathmandu and looking at photos of bare, mud-covered mountainsides where his village once perched.

“Now there’s nothing,” Tamang said. “It’s gone.”

Tamang said his parents and sister were safe in Kathmandu, where they live most of the time. One aunt and uncle were alive because they had happened to go to their shop on higher ground, he had heard. But Tamang did not know whether many other family members or friends had survived, and he said he knew many most likely had not.

“People are gone. The friends that I grew up with, uncles and aunties,” Tamang said. “At some point I feel like, I just feel this is a dream. And then reality strikes me, like, ‘No, it’s real.’”

The floods in Nepal are the latest in a string of disasters linked to human-caused climate change hitting the globe this summer, with record-breaking wildfires and heat killing thousands in Europe, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate across the Northern Hemisphere and sending toxic smoke across international borders.

Read the full article about flash flooding in Nepal by Bob Berwyn and Nicholas Kusnetz at Inside Climate News.