Nepal-Tibet Floods Kill Over 620, Nearly 3,000 Missing

At least 623 people have been killed in devastating floods along the Nepal-Tibet border, with thousands still missing days after a massive surge of water and debris swept through the Himalayan region.

Nepali police said Saturday that 616 people had died in the disaster, while Chinese state media reported seven deaths on the Tibetan side, bringing the combined death toll to at least 623.

Rescue teams in both Nepal and China continued searching for survivors and missing persons after the torrent, described as a tsunami-like wall of water and debris, swept through villages and other communities.

Latest figures from the two countries put the number of missing people at nearly 3,000, while 633 bodies have so far been recovered.

Some of those killed are believed to have been swept downstream, with reports suggesting that bodies could have been carried as far as India.

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The disaster has also affected workers at major energy infrastructure projects in the region. Nepal’s disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to its missing persons list, alongside trekkers and pilgrims visiting Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash.

Survivors said the floods had destroyed their homes and livelihoods, leaving them waiting anxiously for news about relatives and friends still unaccounted for.

Those who survived now face the daunting task of rebuilding their lives after losing virtually everything in the disaster.

“All the settlements near the river were swept away. There is nothing left,” survivor Buddhi Ram Dangol told AFP.

Samjhana Thing said she had been waiting three days for news of her missing brother.

“We don’t know anything. Hopefully he is in a safe place,” she said.

‘Enormous’ Trauma
The trauma of Wednesday’s catastrophe has been “enormous”, and as many as 93,000 people may have been affected, the Red Cross said, with the death toll expected to rise.

Emergency teams had been racing to retrieve survivors from affected zones, where the widespread devastation meant food and water supplies were running out.

Compounding the search for the missing have been fears of further flooding in affected areas.

The deluge of ice and mud caused huge lakes to form, and one of these formations has become a direct threat to emergency workers scouring the region for survivors.

Nepali police urged all rescuers to “immediately move to a safe location”, saying they had received information that “a water dam has burst again on the Tibetan side”.

In Tibet, where Chinese authorities are the only source of information, Beijing suspended its rescue operation at the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding, before saying the threat had eased.

State news agency Xinhua reported early Saturday morning that two villagers had been rescued in the area.

‘All Swept Away’
On the Nepali side of the border, the military located people trapped in the tunnel of the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, where they were working to find a way in to extract the survivors.

“Two helicopters have been dispatched, but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet told AFP.

Some 350 workers and residents have been brought to safety from the site, he added, but efforts were ongoing to rescue more than a hundred trapped in the same area.

Workers rescued from other dam projects along the Trishuli valley described a disaster that unfolded with terrifying speed.

Buddha Tamang told AFP he survived only because he was inside a tunnel at the dam where he worked when the flood struck.

“The senior officers working on the other side, they were all swept away,” Tamang, who was airlifted on Thursday after being marooned for more than 24 hours, told AFP.

Nepal reported a death toll of 626 people on Saturday.

There are 2,426 people, including hundreds of foreigners, who are out of contact in Nepal.

Across the border in Tibet, which is largely inaccessible to foreign journalists, seven people died, and 554 remain missing, the state Xinhua news agency reported early Saturday.

Authorities also said they had evacuated 555 stranded tourists and 499 Chinese residents from Tibet.

In India, authorities said they had recovered seven bodies from rivers flowing from Nepal, believed to be flood victims.

Pilgrimage Route
Scores of Hindu devotees from across the world are among those missing on the border, as many were on a pilgrimage to Tibet’s Mount Kailash.

Sivaranjani Muthunathan was travelling by bus with 56 others towards the Chinese border when they became stuck in what they thought was a traffic jam.

“Then there was fog, smoke, something that seemed to suddenly engulf us,” Muthunathan, 46, told AFP on Friday, showing a phone video she recorded of a torrent surging towards her.

Around them, vehicles were swept away or buried under mud.

“One by one, we also climbed out through the driver’s side,” then scrambled up a hill, she said.

AFP