NUWAKOT (Nepal) — The number of people missing in Nepal and China leaped to more than 2,400 Friday, underscoring the scale of the disaster days after a tsunami-like wall of water and debris swept away villages and killed hundreds.
Rescuers were battling through mud even as the threat of new floods loomed, with emergency teams recovering 584 bodies so far — and some of the dead swept downstream as far away as India.
The new figures came as Nepal’s disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to a missing list already including trekkers and pilgrims to Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash.
Relatives have crowded hospitals in Nepal’s capital in a painful hunt for their loved ones, with posters on the walls bearing photos and names of the missing, AFP journalists saw.
“Today is the third day and we don’t know anything. Hopefully he (my brother) is in a safe place,” Samjhana Thing, 27, told AFP. “We lost everything, he is our everything.”
The US Geological Survey said the disaster – the deadliest for Nepal since a 2015 earthquake – was caused by a glacial collapse that triggered a vast flow of icy debris.
The deluge of ice and mud also caused huge lakes to form, with one of these formations becoming a direct threat to emergency workers scouring the region for survivors.
Nepali police urged all rescuers to “immediately move to a safe location”, saying it had received information that “a water dam has burst again on the Tibetan side”.
Separately in Tibet, China had earlier Friday paused its rescue operation at the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding, before later saying the threat had eased.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that a lake formed by immense piles of debris began overflowing toward where rescue teams were headed, but later said the water level of the pool was dropping so “the risk is gradually decreasing”.
Rescue operations were therefore “proceeding in an orderly manner”, it added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who chaired a meeting on rescue efforts Friday, offered Beijing’s help to Nepal’s emergency operations.
