A turquoise house in Dhunge Bazaar is now a pin on the Nepal flood map

The green house in Dhunge Bazaar, Trishuli, Nuwakot district, still stands. The river took the rest of the lane. Chhatra Bahadur Pyakurel, 67, had walked his grandson to the school bus and come home when the water arrived. The flood came off a glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet watershed and ran down the Trishuli. The family watched from the balcony, then from the roof, for more than an hour. The reinforced-concrete frame held. The first two storeys are now pillars and mud. A washing machine and a pile of laundry are still on the third-floor balcony. Google Maps has a pin that calls the building flood-proof. Visitors have started taking photographs.

Names in the first accounts vary. One dispatch lists Prakash Pandey Pyakurel, 45, his wife Laxmi, two children and the grandparents. Another uses Prakash Piakurel. The family told reporters they thought the house would go. A later video shows someone on the roof waving a red flag for a helicopter. The son survived because his school sat on higher ground. The daughter was about to leave for school when the water hit. The couple had been in a nearby shop and ran back.

The school 14 minutes away

At a school in the same Trishuli belt, the principal stopped classes when the flood warning arrived. About 900 pupils left by bus, motorcycle and on foot. Fourteen minutes after the last bus crossed the bridge, the wave took the village and the school building. That timeline is the other survival story from the same night. It does not have a viral colour. It has a headcount.

The national ledger

Nepal's police put the flood death toll at 1,127 on Wednesday. Thousands remain missing a week after the first surge. Indian aircraft have flown rescue teams and 5.5 tonnes of medicine. A US search group joined the Chilime hydropower tunnel. Singapore and Indian crews were already on those shafts. Families who have not recovered bodies have been lighting straw effigies at Pashupatinath. Four Indian-origin residents of Texas are still unaccounted for on the pilgrimage route through Gyirong and Rasuwagadhi.

The green house does not change those figures. It explains why a disaster that erased streets still produces a single standing object that people can walk around. The frame was poured for a hillside town, not for a glacial flood. It happened to sit at an angle the current did not lever over. The Pyakurels lived because of that geometry and because they went up instead of out. The 900 children lived because an adult believed the warning and emptied a school. Both facts will fade from the feed. The death toll will not. The pin on the map will stay until the next monsoon redraws the lane.