A Disaster in Nepal

As emergency workers flew helicopters up steep Himalayan river valleys yesterday to find survivors of a flood that killed more than 500 people and left more than 1,000 missing, scientists began to investigate its cause. They’ve been looking at satellite imagery and seismological data.

The likely culprit: A gigantic landslide high in the mountains led to a glacial collapse that sent millions of tons of ice and rock into the valleys below it, pulverizing them into mud and water. The slurry burst dams and turned rivers into hydraulic rams. “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” one scientist said.

The scale of the disaster is staggering. It’s as if 1,000 Empire State Buildings exploded at the same time and the debris coursed down a canyon. The path of destruction ran for more than 40 miles. It washed away roads, cut bridges in half, overcame buildings and swallowed people whole.

Anupreeta Das, who covers South Asia, was in Nepal yesterday, flying with rescuers to interview shocked survivors. They told her about the torrents of mud that brought horror into their lives. Here’s what she heard from a resident of a village close to Nepal’s border with Tibet:

“They all died, and I lived,” said Dawa Lama, 45, starting to weep as he recounted how, just before 9 a.m. on Wednesday, he had heard a thunderclap, and then felt a breeze. Before he knew it, an enormous wave of muddy water had slammed into his home of 12 years in the border village of Timure, carrying away not just his belongings but also his wife and their two daughters, 7 and 8.

Our changing climate

Scientists may still be putting together the exact causes of this week’s floods, but they are certain that climate change is heating the Himalayas and increasing the risks of disaster.

Here’s why: A warming planet is melting the region’s permafrost, the mixture of frozen soil and rocks that has sat below its glaciers for millennia. Losing it leaves mountains and glaciers unstable — prone to landslides and collapse.

“As the glaciers retreat and the permafrost melts, we see that these slopes become more susceptible to failure,” one scientist who studies glaciers told The Times, adding, “There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.”

More on the flooding

LAKE ONTARI … OH!

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, effective immediately. The lake sits between the United States and Canada, so it’s a symbolic target amid the trade war between the two countries. (Trump said yesterday that Canada “treats us very badly.”)

Legally speaking, the order — like Trump’s earlier one to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America — likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change. Other countries don’t have to recognize it. Nor do Americans and their businesses, even those within spitting distance of Lake … whatever you call it. (The Times will continue to call it Ontario.)

Amanda Miller, 45, owns Lake Ontario Realty, which has helped people buy and sell waterfront properties in the area for over 20 years. By yesterday afternoon, her phone was blowing up. Everyone wanted to know: Would it be “Lake America Realty” now?

No. It’s nothing personal, Miller told me; business is business. Lake Ontario Realty is well-known in the area around Chaumont, N.Y., and rebranding for no reason is “the worst thing you can do,” she said. — Evan Gorelick

Related: A Canadian official said the U.S. had raised issues with the country’s use of the French language in trade negotiations — and that if the Trump administration changed course, trade talks could potentially resume.

THE LATEST NEWS

Foreign Policy

Politics

Angie Nixon, who scored a surprise victory in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, made pink the signature color of her campaign. Our chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, examines the choice. Click below to watch.

Other Big Stories

ASK THE MORNING (ABOUT POLLING)

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat running for a second term in Pennsylvania, holds a 16-point lead over his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found.

Morning readers often ask how The Times’s polling works. Here’s a question we received from Jean Oswald in Rochester, N.Y.:

How do we know polls are truly showing the breadth and width of Americans’ feelings? I don’t answer my phone when the number is unrecognizable. Perhaps many people like me are not polled.

We asked William Davis, our director of election data analytics, to answer:

Jean, you’re not alone. In our last national poll, we placed 250,000 calls to 100,000 people in order to get 1,500 responses. The question is whether you and other people like you persistently pick up the phone less frequently than groups that are demographically and attitudinally different.
Pollsters have some ways of fixing those issues. They can call more people in groups who are less likely to respond. Or they can adjust the weight of individuals in the poll so groups are correctly represented compared with the census or other sources.
But it’s hard. We know that voters who are engaged with the news respond to polls at higher rates, but we don’t know what the right number of highly engaged news consumers is. As a result, polls can be off if, for example, a candidate like Donald Trump is singularly able to get people who don’t pay much attention to the news to vote for him in overwhelming numbers.

OPINIONS

Trump’s spat with Canada is proof that America is in decline, Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens argue in this week’s edition of The Conversation.

Seeking help is not just for moments of life-or-death crisis. It’s also crucial to becoming successful, Angela Duckworth writes.

1793

— That is the year Davoll’s General Store opened for business in South Dartmouth, Mass. It’s living history. Loiter and linger as long as you like. The photos are great.

SPORTS

Advertising controversy: Good Good Golf lost its partnership with Callaway after an ad from the online platform that depicted its male co-founder shoving a female employee to the ground.

N.F.L.: The Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs was charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery and criminal damage to property stemming from an incident at his Wisconsin home.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

The chef Mario Carbone taught me how to make these pork chops in cherry-pepper sauce a number of years ago and — marone! — what a deliciously pure taste of Italian American cuisine they are. This time of year, with cherry peppers ripening on the vine, I make the dish with fresh peppers instead of the pickled ones called for in the recipe. If you do that, add a splash of lemon juice or white wine vinegar to the sauce at the end, for acidity.

PERSON OF INTEREST

Peter Grainger is a British crime writer who self-published his way into prominence. His main character, the independent-minded detective D.C. Smith, plays things straight.

“One of the things you pick up when you read successful crime novels is how dysfunctional the police are,” he told Sarah Lyall, who writes about lots of things at The Times but is particularly great on thrillers and mysteries. “They’re having breakdowns, they’re alcoholics, they’re in abusive relationships. I thought, ‘This trope has taken over the genre and I don’t want to do that. I will do the opposite.’”

Read about the best literary detective you’ve never heard of.

Ekjhalak Hindi