KATHMANDU, Nepal — Authorities in Nepal have warned of the risk of further flooding after heavy rain, as China sheds light on the scale of the disaster in its Tibet region.
Five days after surging floodwaters from a glacier collapse buried communities across the region in thick mud, rescuers in Nepal were still struggling to reach devastated communities as the full scale of the destruction emerged.
“The disaster here is overwhelming,” Ferrin Cole, an operations director at the U.S.-based Crisis Response International, told NBC News on Sunday. “The flood that came down that mountain just wiped out cities. We’re going in as fast as we can to get people the help that they need.”
Cole said that his team would be working to help locate missing people but that working in mud “is actually pretty dangerous.”
“The longer that death and mud are together, diseases breed, and so we’re always just aware of that,” he added.
Approximately 100 Americans are among the missing across Nepal and China’s Tibet region, the State Department said Saturday.
How did the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet flood happen?
In Nepal, the death toll has risen to 781, with over 2,500 people still missing, including 592 foreign nationals, according to the country’s disaster agency. The Nepal Tourism Board said 289 foreign nationals have been rescued.
China has separately reported 16 deaths and 546 people missing in its Tibet region, including 261 foreign nationals. It is unclear how much overlap there is between the Chinese and Nepali missing-person counts.
Those missing loved ones may face a long wait for answers, with many bodies washed far downstream and recovered in poor condition. Morgues in Nepal have been overwhelmed, though authorities are collecting DNA samples in the hopes of notifying relatives.
In Nepal’s Chitwan district, where a number of bodies have washed up, police officer Anil Thapa told Reuters that “more than half” of recovered bodies were “beyond recognition.”
“Many have no visible faces. In some cases, only hands or legs remain,” the officer added.
The response is also being complicated by a landslide-dammed lake above the border checkpoint that is overflowing, while heavy rain in Nepal has pushed up river levels and prompted fresh warnings for people living along waterways.
Nepal’s flood alert system said Sunday that heavy rain had been measured in various watershed areas of Gandaki province, and that the water levels were “expected to rise.”
“Therefore, people living in riverside areas are requested to adopt caution,” it said on X.
But in flood-hit areas, residents were struggling to make sense of repeated warnings since the initial floods.
“Sometimes they say a flood is coming, then we have to run again to higher ground, even at night. There is also rain,” Govind Shreshta, a resident of the town of Galchhi, told The Associated Press. “It’s really difficult for me. I have a 72-year-old father and 70-year-old mom. I must carry them and I am exhausted. It’s going on like this for those who are still alive.”
Chinese state-run media outlet CCTV said Sunday that the event was part of a growing pattern of glacier-related disasters in the region, with the avalanche reaching China’s Gyirong Port within minutes of occurring.
“The disaster was caused by glacier instability resulting from the long-term effects of climate warming,” said Chinese state media.
“It struck suddenly, with a large peak flow, high speed, severe destructive force and a wide impact area,” the report added. “These are also new and significant characteristics of cryosphere-related disasters emerging across the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions.”
While it will take time to determine the exact cause of the mudslide and flood disaster, analysts say climate change likely played a role.
The Himalayan region, which includes Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, China and Afghanistan, is among the places most vulnerable to climate change, with temperatures rising faster than the global average. The warmer conditions are accelerating glacial melt, further destabilizing a region that is already prone to floods, landslides and earthquakes.
The suspected collapse of a melting glacier shook the ground so violently that seismic monitors initially registered it as a magnitude-4.4 earthquake.
The U.S. Geological Survey later revised that number to the equivalent of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake and said a second seismic event three hours after the first registered as the equivalent of a 4.2 temblor. Debris flow and flooding from what it called a “slope failure” traveled 62 miles, the USGS said.
“We will not be able to attribute 100% that this is because of climate change, because these changes have been happening” over a long period of time, Neera Shrestha Pradhan, an expert at Nepal’s International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, said Friday. But climate change might be breaking a threshold, she said, and “maybe that might be one of the causes of this happening.”
Janis Mackey Frayer, Dawn Liu and Sunil Pandey reported from Kathmandu and Freddie Clayton from London.
