Nepalese police say more than 150 bodies recovered – as it happened

This live blog has now closed – you can follow the latest at a new Nepal floods live blog here We’re closing this page now and continuing our live coverage of the deadly Nepal flash flood in a new blog here, including a summary of the latest developments. Continuing from the last post: a hydrologist said one thing that struck him was the lack of rainfall before the disaster. “That defeats essentially every operational flood warning system in the world,” Hatim Sharif at the University of Texas San Antonio told AFP. By the time you saw the mud flow coming, it was too late, he said. “Running will not help,” nor will trying to flee by vehicle, Sharif added, because the mud and water moving at high speed form a lethal combination “like liquid concrete”. The only solution was to climb at least six metres (20 feet) up a hill, he estimated. A researcher at the UK’s University of Reading, Dorothy Heinrich, said: “In these mountain environments, the rivers can be quite narrow in areas.” Anything that blocked them – be it an avalanche or landslide – would lead to a “big accumulation of water, then it creates these incredibly fast floods”. Lethal surges of mud and