A week after a torrent of mud, ice and debris comparable to a tsunami tore through the Trishuli river valley, the disaster that struck the Nepal-Tibet border region continues to worsen. According to the latest official figures released this Sunday, 750 people have lost their lives and more than 3,000 remain missing.
The catastrophe began early Wednesday morning, around 8:40 a.m. local time, in Nepal’s Rasuwa district. A mass of debris broke loose from a mountainside and plunged roughly 1,800 meters downslope before slamming into communities along the Trishuli, according to observations from the US Geological Survey. The resulting wave swallowed homes, bridges and roads in its path, turning entire villages into fields of rubble within minutes.
On the Nepali side, the national disaster management authority reports 734 bodies recovered and 2,498 people still missing, including 589 foreign nationals. In China, authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region have confirmed 16 deaths and counted 546 people unaccounted for, among them at least 261 foreigners. One piece of good news has nonetheless brightened an otherwise grim picture: Nepal’s Tourism Board announced that two of the three missing Spanish nationals have since been found alive.
The rescue operation has now entered a particularly delicate phase. Search teams are focusing their efforts on hundreds of people believed trapped inside tunnels at hydropower plants, buried under tons of ice and rock swept down by the flood. This work has been hampered by deteriorating weather, forcing search operations to be suspended several times since Friday, both because of the conditions and a genuine ongoing threat. A lake formed at the Nepal-China border following the initial landslide, and it has begun spilling into nearby rivers. Chinese officials maintain that the situation remains stable for now, though caution continues to guide the response.
Given the scale of the disaster, international aid is mobilizing. Washington raised its humanitarian assistance package to $3.6 million, up from just $500,000 announced two days earlier, funding meant to cover three months of emergency food aid for ten thousand affected households. Beijing, meanwhile, has deployed more than 2,100 rescue workers to the ground. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke by phone with his Nepali counterpart on Saturday to discuss coordinating relief efforts. The Red Cross estimates that more than 90,000 people have been affected in some way by the disaster, which Beijing has explicitly linked to the effects of climate change.
Among the missing are numerous tourists and pilgrims from around the world. The United States still counts 90 citizens unaccounted for, though five have since been evacuated, up from three the day before. Australia has recorded at least 41 missing nationals, including a Sydney couple who had traveled to the region on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash inspired by Indian spiritual leader Sadhguru. Canada, for its part, had roughly thirty citizens who could not be reached in the days immediately following the disaster. The list of nationalities involved stretches far beyond these examples, spanning Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Italy, Belarus, Finland, Israel, Lithuania, the Philippines, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden and Vietnam.
Nepal’s Office of the Prime Minister has expressed « deep sorrow » over the loss of life, paying tribute to the victims and extending condolences to grieving families. From Ladakh, the Dalai Lama also called for prayers for those still missing, while stressing the need to protect the region’s fragile Himalayan environment in order to prevent disasters of this magnitude from happening again.
With hundreds of people still actively being searched for and the risk of further flooding looming over the area, this toll may well continue to rise in the days ahead.