China and Nepal race to find thousands still missing 12 days after floods

Twelve days into the search, rescuers in Nepal and Tibet are still combing through mud, flooded hydropower tunnels and a narrow gorge for thousands of people missing after catastrophic floods.

Nepal’s national disaster agency said it had recovered 1,341 bodies and was searching for about 4,996 people. In Tibet, the death toll reached 43, with 519 people still missing, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported. Across the two countries, authorities say at least 1,384 people have died and more than 5,500 remain unaccounted for, including about 800 foreigners.

Four people have been found alive since Friday. Three were discovered in tunnels at hydropower facilities, where the government had initially said about 100 people could still be alive. Nepal’s Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha said teams working in the flooded tunnels faced difficult geography, bad weather and poor communications. “Search and rescue is going on at the tunnels despite geography, adverse weather and lack of connectivity,” he told AFP.

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Search and rescue is going on at the tunnels despite geography, adverse weather and lack of connectivity.

On the Chinese side, deep mud, poor weather and the threat of further landslides have slowed the operation. At Gyirong, once China’s main land port with Nepal, almost nothing remains of a five-storey customs building. Workers are using shovels, excavators and ground-penetrating radar to search for people. The only road into Gyirong reopened on Wednesday, allowing heavy equipment to reach the site.

Nepal is also pressing the international community over the disaster’s cost. It has asked the United Nations-backed Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage to help cover the damage and requested $50 million in emergency aid for more than 84,000 people. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said leading greenhouse-gas emitters had a “historical responsibility to compensate vulnerable nations like Nepal” and that the government had filed a formal climate compensation claim. The exact cause of the glacial collapse remains under investigation, while experts say glacier floods have become more frequent and larger as global temperatures rise.

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historical responsibility to compensate vulnerable nations like Nepal