Nepal chokes on smoke and ash as drought-worsened wildfires rage on
Thomson Reuters Foundation, DANG, Nepal
In the eight years that Basudev Pokharel has worked as a forest guard, he has rarely seen a fire as huge as the one that raged through his village in western Nepal last month.
Hundreds of such fires have been spreading across the country since November last year, in the worst wildfire season Nepal has seen in a decade.
The night the blaze reached Pokharel’s village of Sungure, in Dang District, a neighbor woke him to warn him.
A man takes a picture of a forest fire on the outskirts of Kathmandu on Thursday last week.