Bay Area Nepal native desperately seeking loved ones after catastophic flooding

By CBS Bay Area

A Marin County man is watching the devastation in his native Nepal from thousands of miles away, desperately waiting for news about friends and loved ones still missing after catastrophic flooding.

Jay Tamang, a nature photographer who grew up in Nepal, said he initially struggled to believe the images coming out of the Himalayan region.

“I woke up in the morning and I thought it was AI-generated videos, because it was so crazy that I never thought about it, that it would happen,” Tamang said.

Then the messages started coming.

“That’s where I realized, it is real,” he said.

Tamang has spent much of the week glued to his phone, trying to reach friends and family in Nepal.

“So I tried to contact my friends and family,” he said.

But widespread damage to telecommunications infrastructure has made it difficult to reach people in some of the hardest-hit areas.

“At this point, due to lack of telecommunications,” Tamang said. “We really couldn’t contact.”

The communications outages have left entire villages difficult to reach, adding to the uncertainty for families in the Bay Area with loved ones back home.

“People from my village, people from my wife’s villages, there are a lot of people still missing,” Tamang said.

His wife’s sister is safe, but several of Tamang’s close friends remain unaccounted for.

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” he said.

The U.S. State Department says 90 Americans are currently unaccounted for in Nepal and Tibet.

Among them is a man from Milpitas, Prabhath Sajeeepa, whose brother said on Facebook that he was traveling with an international pilgrimage group. His last known location was in an area directly affected by the disaster.

“We are urgently seeking any verified information,” his brother wrote.

Tamang said he understands the anguish of waiting for word from loved ones.

“There are a lot of missings and hopefully we will be able to find out soon,” he said.

The devastation is also personal for his family.

“It is very close to my wife’s village, there was the whole entire village swept away,” Tamang said.

Access to some areas has been severely limited.

“The only way access is going by helicopter at this moment,” he said.

The Nepali Association of Northern California is hosting a candlelight vigil Friday night for victims of the disaster, giving Bay Area Nepalis an opportunity to grieve together.

For Tamang, the focus right now remains on finding out what happened to the people he knows and loves.

He said he hopes to eventually find a way to help communities affected by the disaster.

“Maybe in the later future I might do some kind of, raise the funds, and be able to help,” Tamang said. “But for now, at this moment, I just don’t even know.”