The confirmed death toll from the catastrophic flooding that tore through Himalayan valleys in Nepal and Tibet passed 1,000 on Tuesday, as rescue crews using helicopters, drones and hand tools kept searching mud-choked riverbanks for thousands of people still unaccounted for nearly a week after a glacier gave way in the mountains above.
Nepal's disaster management authority said it had counted 987 deaths, with 3,916 people still listed as missing, including 583 foreign nationals from more than three dozen countries. Across the border in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Chinese authorities have confirmed 16 deaths and put the number of missing at 546, according to figures reported Tuesday.
The single largest concentration of the missing is tied to Himalayan hydropower construction. Roughly 900 workers are unaccounted for across a dozen damaged hydropower projects in the flood zone, and officials estimate as many as 500 of them may be trapped in flooded tunnels that run deep into the mountainside, a discovery that has slowed the broader search as crews weigh the risk of further collapse against the odds of finding survivors.
Nepali authorities say 11,814 people have been pulled from the disaster zone alive since the flooding began, many of them airlifted by helicopter from villages that were cut off when roads and bridges washed away in the initial surge.
What triggered the flood
Scientists who reviewed satellite imagery say the disaster began on Aug. 26, when bedrock beneath a glacier high in the Himalayas failed, releasing a mass of rock, ice and meltwater powerful enough to register as a magnitude-5.2 seismic event. The resulting surge poured into rivers running through valleys on both sides of the Nepal-Tibet border, and the water rose fast enough to sweep away homes, roads, bridges and entire hillside settlements before many residents could flee to higher ground.
"It felt like I was flying over an entirely different landscape. I can see the pain in their eyes. It's heartbreaking."
Bimal Sharma, helicopter pilot ferrying survivors from the flood zone
Glaciologists say the collapse was years, if not decades, in the making. The high-altitude Langtang region has warmed at roughly five times the global average since the 1960s, according to research led by Newcastle University glaciologist Bethan Davies, and Himalayan glacier ice loss has doubled since 2000. As permafrost that once acted as the "glue" holding mountainsides together thaws, slopes become progressively less stable — a process scientists say is consistent with, though not definitively proven to be caused by, a warming climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said with high confidence that retreating glaciers and thawing permafrost are already destabilizing mountain regions worldwide.
Kathmandu has appealed to neighboring India and China for help, and aid has begun arriving from further afield. The United Nations, the Red Cross, Australia, South Korea and the United States have all sent personnel or supplies, while the World Food Programme is distributing emergency rations and the World Health Organization has flown in medical kits sized for roughly 10,000 people. Save the Children and the Nepal Red Cross have begun distributing emergency shelter packages in Nuwakot district, one of the hardest-hit areas.
Forecasters are watching for renewed monsoon rain that could hamper the search in the days ahead, and officials in both Nepal and China have not set a timeline for when operations might shift from rescue to recovery. For now, families of the missing continue to gather at government offices in Kathmandu seeking word of relatives who were in the valleys when the glacier collapsed, as the confirmed death toll climbs toward a disaster that is already among the deadliest in the Himalayas in decades.
