Rescuers in Nepal and China are still battling to locate thousands of people missing days after a deadly, tsunami-like wall of water and debris swept through the Himalayan region, engulfing villages .
The number of missing soared close to 3,000 on Saturday, latest figures from both countries showed, with 633 bodies recovered. The disaster was triggered by a glacial collapse on the Tibet side of the border, which sent a catastrophic surge of rock, ice, mud, and debris down the Lhende Khola into the Bhote Koshi River . The collapse was large enough to register as a magnitude 4.4 seismic event with the US Geological Survey .
In an area home to vast energy infrastructure projects, Nepal’s disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to a missing persons list already including trekkers and pilgrims to Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash . The Nepal army said it had rescued about 350 workers and residents from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project site, while more than 100 people remained trapped in the same area .
Those who made it out say they have lost everything and now face an agonising wait to discover the fate of missing loved ones. “All the settlements near the river were swept away. There is nothing left,” survivor Buddhi 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” .
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, where the widespread devastation meant food and water supplies were running out .
Compounding the search for the missing have been fears of further flooding. The deluge of ice and mud caused huge lakes to form, and one of these formations has become a direct threat to emergency workers . 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, Beijing suspended its rescue operation at the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding, before saying the threat had eased .
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 .
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 .
