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In some of the areas devastated by the floods in Nepal, rescue teams are using cargo drones to remove corpses from places that are no longer normally accessible and transport them to points from which they can continue by land to morgues.
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In Devighat, one of these drones takes off from a riverbank with a corpse suspended on a stretcher and crosses to a facility set up on the other side, where the body is collected to continue its transfer to the morgues.
Milan Pandey, director of Airlift Technology and member of a team working alongside the Nepal Police and Army, explained to EFE that the drones are being used both to locate bodies in the affected areas and to transport food and other supplies.
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"Eight members of our team use a DJI 100, a cargo drone capable of carrying up to 80 kilos, as well as other smaller drones to identify bodies on riverbanks," said Pandey.
The carrying capacity allows for air transport over routes that the destruction of roads, bridges, and access points has made extremely difficult by land, a problem especially acute in mountainous areas and along rivers.
The use of these aircraft is part of a broader deployment activated after the floods. The Drone Association of Nepal mobilized operators to Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading to support search, rescue, and damage assessment tasks, with more than 50 pilots and specialists in mapping and data analysis linked to the operation.
Homes buried up to the roof
Among the mobilized teams are drones with thermal cameras and devices used with LiDAR technology to locate people, identify bodies, and obtain information about the terrain in areas where land access remains limited.
The organization had also considered the use of drones to bring medicine, food, and other supplies to isolated communities, a capability that allows some of the routes cut off by the disaster to be covered.
In Devighat, in the Nuwakot district, several meters of mud, stones, and debris cover the old streets, and there are houses buried almost to their roofs. Inside some of them, bodies remain that have not yet been recovered because the instability of the ground prevents the entry of heavy machinery in certain spots.
The smell of decomposition accompanies much of the journey through the town and intensifies around some of those houses, as efforts continue to locate and remove the dead.
The floods have already caused more than a thousand deaths between China and Tibet, thousands of missing people, and have left roads and bridges destroyed and entire communities isolated, which has turned the transport of bodies into another part of an operation that does not end when teams manage to find them.
[Publicidad]