One of America’s most dangerous volcanoes could one day unleash a disaster resembling the tsunami-like flash flood and landslide that devastated Nepal.

Washington’s Mount Rainier is an active, heavily glaciated stratovolcano looming over more than 3.3 million people across the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, with ice-covered slopes capable of unleashing deadly torrents of mud and debris with little warning.

More than 60,000 residents live within the volcano’s lahar danger zone, where fast-moving rivers of water, rock, mud and debris behave like wet concrete, bulldozing everything in their path within 15 minutes – and they occur with or without a volcanic eruption https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16082015/mount-rainier-washington-volcano-lahar-threat.html

The natural disaster is believed to have been triggered by an avalanche or glacier collapse which sent a huge chunk of ice roughly 2,000 feet wide falling down thousands of feet into the Lhende Khola river valley along the Nepal-Tibet border.

The giant ice shard mixed with water, rock and debris to create a sudden and powerful surge of muddy floodwater that rushed into the Bhote Koshi River, devastating the Rasuwa district of Nepal.