People salvage usable materials from their houses deluged in sludge after flash floods at Devighat in Nepal. Photo / AFP
The number of people missing in Nepal and China has leapt to nearly 3000, 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 633 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 hunt for their loved ones, with posters on the walls bearing photos and names of the missing.
Five New Zealanders are among the missing: Dejan Kuzmic, Shweta Mhatre, Mihir Patel, Kinnari Patel and Suhasini Reddy.
RNZ reports that a list of rescued foreign travellers released by the Nepal Tourism Board late on Friday did not identify any New Zealanders, though the nationalities of three of the 121 people were yet to be confirmed.
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 on 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 piles of debris began overflowing towards where rescue teams were headed, but later said the water level of the pool was dropping so “the risk is gradually decreasing”.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who chaired a meeting on rescue efforts on Friday, offered Beijing’s help to Nepal’s emergency operations.
Emergency teams had been racing to retrieve survivors from affected zones, where the widespread devastation meant food and water supplies were running out.
The Nepali military had meanwhile located people trapped in the tunnel of Trishuli 3A hydropower project, where they were working to find a way in to extract the survivors.
