“I was in Tapoban with my mother, brother and his family. We had just finished observing a waterfall when suddenly a loud grinding noise started,” he said.
“The entire hill started shaking. The strong shaking lasted for nearly a minute. We tried to call family. We were reluctant to return to home straight away as more aftershocks were coming and we were wary of landslides in the hill roads.
“After waiting for a couple of hours we decided to return and saw the devastation along the way.”
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READ NOWThe 33-year-old was born in Kathmandu.
He moved to Perth with his wife in 2012, but had returned home on April 4 for festival season.
He started learning the basics of earthquake engineering in Nepal in 2006 because of the seismic activity in the south Asian country and inspiration from his mentors.
Mr Shrestha joined Tribhuwan University in Nepal to study a master in structural engineering.
His thesis research work was focused on seismic performance of structures in Nepal.
His hunger to learn and do more in the field of earthquake engineering led him to Perth, where he now lives in the suburb of Langford.
With several years of experience and being in Nepal when the earthquake hit, Mr Shrestha was able to use his skills to collect field data on behalf of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES).
“I basically collected the damage details with their geospatial locations and basic summary of damage pattern that could help others to identify the distribution and extent of damages at different location in Kathmandu valley and eastern hill towns of Chautara and Dolakha bazaar,” he said.
Mr Shrestha was supposed to return to Perth on May 9, but extended his stay until May 30 so he could continue to help.
Having seen the horrific impact of the earthquake, he hopes enough is learnt to prevent the same thing happening again.
“There is no doubt that we will rise again but we need to ensure that we will rise not to fall again,” Mr Shrestha said.
“For this better building techniques will have to be advocated.”
Mr Shrestha lost his aunt and 200-year-old ancestral home in the earthquake.