By Saurabh Sharma and Gopal Sharma
NUWAKOT, Nepal, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Rescue teams using heavy machinery dug through mud and debris in Nepalese towns devastated by a flash flood two days ago, as hopes of finding survivors faded and officials worked to reduce the risk of further catastrophic flooding.
The confirmed death toll in Nepal rose to 469 people early on Friday, with almost 1,000 more missing there and in neighbouring Tibet, near where a glacier collapse on Wednesday morning sent a huge torrent of rock, ice, mud and debris cascading through Himalayan mountain river systems.
The flood ripped through villages and valleys, destroying power stations, roads and bridges along a route that links Kathmandu with Lhasa in Tibet and is popular with trekkers and pilgrims. Of those missing, at least 540 are foreigners.
Authorities in Nepal used helicopters to search for survivors and drop emergency supplies to thousands cut off in towns and valleys, while emergency services – some using sniffer dogs – recovered dozens of bodies swept down into the plains.
Dibga Tamang was among the last people rescued from the hard-hit town of Rasuwa on Thursday, airlifted along with three others to an army camp in Nuwakot.
“All of our people have gone. They are dead,” Tamang said. “I have no one left waiting for me. Everything and everyone is gone. The end.”
The sheer amount of water and debris stirred up now risks triggering a further disaster.
Nepal’s disaster management authority warned that a lake formed by debris blocking the Bhotekoshi River was rising and at risk of bursting, while on the other side of the border China said that some 3 million cubic metres of water — the equivalent of about 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools — was expected to flow into an already dammed lake over the next three days.
There is a high risk the lake could breach, with peak flow expected around September 1, Chinese state media said, citing the water resources ministry.
Chinese authorities have mobilised an eight-member engineering team to conduct aerial surveys and 3D modelling of the barrier lake, but accessing it was challenging.
“After the glacier collapse created the lake, many isolated cliffs and steep cliffs appeared along it,” one of the engineers, Chen Hanxiao, told CCTV.
Chen said the general approach to reducing the lake’s threat is to excavate a drainage channel at a lower point of the dam but the width and depth of that channel needed calculations based on how fast the water will flow and how quickly the lake will fill.
Their next tasks were to monitor the lake and collect data from the lake floor, as well as weather monitoring in the coming days.
TORRENT TORE THROUGH BORDER CROSSING
Chinese rescuers had yet to reach the worst-hit area on the Chinese side of the border, the Gyirong border crossing, by Thursday evening, state media reports indicated, as crews worked to clear debris from the key access road leading to the area.
Dramatic footage on Wednesday showed enormous torrents of muddy water and debris tearing through structures in the border crossing area within seconds and engulfing people trying to flee.
The tally of missing in Tibet’s Gyirong County was 558, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said on Thursday, including 260 foreign nationals. So far, just three people have been confirmed dead on the Chinese side.
China’s Premier Li Qiang, the country’s No. 2 official, arrived at the disaster-stricken site in Gyirong on Thursday afternoon, state-run Xinhua news agency said. The visit suggested Beijing was treating the disaster as a matter of the highest national priority.
BUILDINGS ‘WIPED OUT LIKE TOOTHPICKS’
Around the world, relatives of those missing were desperate for information about their whereabouts.
Sneha Sudhir was one of 10 women whose husbands had set out from Nepal on a trek to Tibet’s Mount Kailash when the region was struck by disaster.
The men, all from northern Virginia, are among dozens of Americans missing.
“Where are they?” Sudhir said tearfully from her home in Chantilly, Virginia, on Thursday.
Sudhir said the women were supporting each other and reaching out to officials, politicians and friends and family in the United States and India, hoping for word.
“Everybody is taking turns in shedding their tears, wiping it off and getting back to work,” she said.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. had offered support to Nepal.
“Nobody’s ever seen anything quite like that, where very powerful, strong, well-built buildings were wiped out like they were toothpicks. It’s a terrible thing. We are sending aid and we’ve spoken to the leadership and we let them know anything they want, they’ll have.”
Ganesh Aryal, the administrator of Chitwan district, said authorities had recovered 103 bodies from the river system in his district, which is about 100 km (62 miles) away in the plains from the worst-hit region of Trishuli.
With local hospitals unable to accommodate all the bodies, district authorities were setting up tents and making arrangements for families to claim their dead relatives, he said.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah, who visited flood-hit Nuwakot on Thursday, said the situation was still difficult.
“All the state agencies are operating at full capacity. Our first priority now is to save life of each citizen, search and rescue of the missing, treat the injured and provide immediate relief to the affected families,” he said.
The disaster is a major challenge for Shah’s five-month-old government but officials said the country had systems and officials who have experience in handling such tragedies, including the 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people.
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma, Sahana Bajracharya, Aftab Ahmed, Saurabh Sharma, Liz Lee, Yukun Zhang, Xiuhao Chen, Shi Bu, Sakshi Dayal, Kanjyik Ghosh, Shilpa Jamkhandikar, Hritam Mukherjee, Ashley Tang and Christine Chen; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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