AP PHOTOS: Cascading disasters push residents of a Nepalese valley to the brink

MELAMCHI, Nepal (AP) — In between the Himalayas' towering mountains, the town of Melamchi is no stranger to extreme weather, and its landscape bears the scars of years of floods and landslides.

Located just 50 kilometers (31 miles) outside Kathmandu, lush green mountainsides are dotted with landslips and rubble. Amid the debris, people live and work, and children play.

Saroj Lamichane, a 24-year-old resident of the region, says he still remembers “the terrifying sound of the flood.” Lamichane fled that night, returning only to collect belongings wedged between boulders and broken walls.

Many houses in Melamchi are on stilts to avoid the worst of the flooding. Still, floors are covered in a layer of loose rock. Windows have been ripped out of walls. And some buildings still slant after Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquake.

Farms are also not spared.

Sukuram Tamang, 50, lost his land and field to floods in 2021, and his home was damaged in a landslide this year. When The Associated Press visited, Tamang stood holding one of his goats — a literal handful of what survived Melamchi's incessant weather extremes.

“Even the little that remained has been swept away by floods earlier this year,” said Tamang's wife, Maya. “The river used to be a 20-minute walk from our house but during the floods, we were shocked to see it overflow and wash away everything we had.”

Another farmer, Sita Pandit, 50, took a loan to rebuild her home that was destroyed in the earthquake. But one year after construction finished, her new home was swept away by the 2021 floods. Rocks and debris now cover her farm.

In a 2021 report, the Kathmandu headquartered International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development found that cascading hazards are becoming more common in Nepal and the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

Rising temperatures are leading to heavy glacial melt and glacial lakes overflowing. They also lead to shifting rainfall patterns which bring heavy sediments downstream, said Sudan Bikash Maharjan, one of the authors of the 2021 report.

Maharjan said local and federal governments need to be better prepared and give people time to evacuate.

Until then, many work hard to rebuild their old lives. People reconstruct homes among the debris or build new ones entirely. They walk and live among pieces of homes and furniture. Layers of mud cover up the lives they once lived.

Follow Niranjan Shrestha on Instagram.

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A girl runs in front of the recent landslide at Gyalthum, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Abandoned houses are visible in Chanaute Market, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Footprints are visible at Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast from Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, on the sand inside a house damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

A man gazes out from an abandoned house in Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

A man walks by abandoned houses in Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Saroj Lamichane salvages bricks from the ruins of his house northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, that was destroyed by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

The sand-filled entrance of a house is visible in Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, that was damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Sukuram Tamang, 50, prepares to cook food inside a temporary shelter on rented land in Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, after he lost his home in a landslide. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Rocks and sand fill an abandoned home in Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, June 26, 2024, that was damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

A man sets a fish trap near homes abandoned after flooding at Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Sukuram Tamang, 50, stands with his goat in front of where his house once stood after it was damaged by recent landslides in Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

A worker uses an excavator to clear land for a road that would connect to the upper villages of Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Laxmi Jyoti, 41, walks near where her home used to be in Chanaute, Melamchi, northeast from Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, now covered with large rocks brought by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Suntali Jyoti, 56, sits where her house and field once stood, in Chanaute, Melamchi, northeast from Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, now covered with large rocks brought by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Children play volleyball with a landslide-damaged hill visible in the background at Saraswati Secondary School in Gyalthum, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Sita Pandit, 50, walks in her house at Chanaute Market, Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, that was damaged by floods in 2021. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Kali Prasad Shrestha, 57, stands near Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, on the spot where his house once stood before it was swept away by floods in 2021.(AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

CAIRO (AP) — Iranians began to regain internet access on Wednesday after authorities ended a monthslong shutdown. But users said service was slow and spotty in some areas, with apps like YouTube and Instagram heavily restricted, as they were before the cutoff began during nationwide protests in January.

Authorities justified the outage as a military imperative after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Their decision to lift some restrictions this week came as negotiators appeared to be closing in on a more permanent truce. But many Iranians feared access could be cut off again at a moment's notice.

Internet tracking company Netblocks said Iran’s connectivity, which measures the ability of devices to connect to the internet, is at around 86% of capacity from before the cutoff. Internet analysis firm Kentik said internet traffic, which measures the amount of data transferred and is a good illustration of usage, was at around 40%.

Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity analyst, said there were still widespread disruptions. “It's too early to say the shutdown is over,” he wrote on X.

Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. Young people with online careers saw their incomes evaporate. Job losses and the closure of online businesses added to the war's steep economic costs.

The cutoff made it difficult for Iranian families to communicate through months of unrest and war. At some points, phone lines were also cut off, though they were later restored.

A woman living in Tehran said that for months she was barely able to speak to her sons living abroad. She couldn't believe authorities had restored access, saying she had assumed they would find some justification to prolong the outage.

A taxi driver said service was restored but weak. He expressed hope it would improve so he could use messaging apps with family and friends. Both spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Prices spiked during the shutdown, with residents in Tehran at times paying around $7.50 per gigabyte. Prices are back down to around $2.25 for 30 gigabytes, roughly where they were before the protests.

Even then, Iran tightly controlled access to popular social media sites, leading many to rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs. The cost of those workarounds soared during the shutdown, making them unaffordable for many as the economy was battered.

Businesses have started reappearing online, announcing their return with posts on sites like Instagram and Telegram.

A gamer and tech influencer in the central city of Isfahan said the shutdown had caused him to lose a lot of his audience on YouTube and Instagram, where he had spent years building up a large following.

“All my views and interactions are way down. I’ve been erased from the algorithm,” he said in a voice note sent by WhatsApp, adding that his internet connection was still slower than before the shutdown.

“The situation is such that many content producers have had their income reduced to zero, have moved on to other jobs, or have been forced to sell their equipment to survive,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests that were eventually stamped out in a violent crackdown. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands detained.

That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout after the start of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other top officials.

The government faced criticism for the prolonged shutdown, which caused even more harm to an economy devastated by inflation, strikes on key industries and a U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.

The internet cutoff cost an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper last month. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi.

Iranians still had access to a national net, but that has a far narrower reach, and users complained of poor service and heavy censorship. Senior government officials are given SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure, the government expanded access to the SIM cards to some professions during the shutdown.

A woman checks her smartphone while sitting on a bench along a sidewalk in northern Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, May 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)