BIDUR, Nepal — At the Nepal army staging area in the heart of the flood zone, the roar of helicopters overhead carrying flood aid mixes with the rumble of a bulldozer digging a mass grave.
The overwhelming stench of death is crushing hopes that more survivors will be found in Bidur, a town in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, devastated by last week’s catastrophic floods.
Workers in white hazmat suits unload bodies from a stream of ambulances. They place the wrapped bodies onto a blue tarp in a cordoned-off area.
Helicopters, both military and private aircraft that in better days would be used for commercial tours, take off packed with aid before returning with survivors in need of medical care.
Kalpana Shrestha, a nurse who works in the capital, Kathmandu, is desperate. Ten members of her family are missing — her two sisters and their three children.
“I have shared their photos with journalists, on social media and YouTube, but I have not got any response at all,” she told NBC News in Kathmandu on Tuesday. She added that her loved ones disappeared in Betrawati, a town some 60 miles from the capital that was obliterated in the flooding.
“I have posted so much that my fingers started shaking and trembling,” Shrestha, 35, said. “My mind has stopped working. But even so, we have not stopped posting.”
More than 1,114 have been declared dead in Nepal after last week’s devastating floods, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. Over 3,916 others are still missing, including at least 583 foreign nationals. In Tibet, at least 16 people were killed and 546 are missing, according to CGTN, China’s English-language satellite news channel.
A State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that 75 Americans remain unaccounted for and that 14 have made their way to safety in Nepal.
More than 10,000 people have been rescued so far, including 252 foreign nationals, the United Nations said.
The disaster, which was triggered by a glacier collapse and landslide on Nepal’s border with China, is now considered Nepal’s deadliest natural disaster since the April 2015 earthquake that killed around 9,000 people.
Shrestha said she felt that the government was “not doing enough work to search and rescue to locate” her family. She also noted that access to her village, Betrawati, was still difficult after the floods.
“Our brothers did try but failed to reach them and had to return home,” she said. “The road is gone. There is no access at all.”
Access remains the single biggest obstacle to response efforts, with roads passable only as far as Nuwakot and some sections of highway linking Kathmandu to the hardest-hit areas still completely blocked, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
And the bodies that have been recovered pose a huge challenge to authorities, who are using at least 21 hospitals in a string of districts to store remains, according to Nepal’s disaster agency. In some cases, bodies are being buried to prevent any risk of infection, with hopes they will be later identified so the remains can be returned to loved ones.
Speaking with NBC News in Pokhara, Nabin Karki, a superintendent of police, said authorities were collecting DNA samples and displaying photos of the bodies found in hopes that family members might be able to identify them.
Relatives of those missing can provide blood samples for DNA testing, he said, and if a match is found, the body can be taken from the burial site and handed over to the family for a funeral.
Khularam Thing, 41, a guide with Kailash Journeys, a popular tour company, said he was coming to the army staging area every day to check the names on the lists of survivors. One of the agency’s groups was about 5 miles from the border crossing with China, heading to Mount Kailash in Tibet.
He said there were 31 people in the group of tourists, including “several Americans” as well as five staff members.
Asked what made him hopeful the group could be found, he said, “I think it’s 0.0% chance. There are no chances right now. It’s a big flood.”
Janis Mackey Frayer and Dawn Liu reported from Bidur, Michael Fiorentino and Surendra Phuyal from Kathmandu, Nepal, and Sunil Pandey from Pokhara, Nepal.
