Nepalese officials said Wednesday that several tourists who went missing after last week’s catastrophic floods along the Tibetan border have managed to make contact with rescue workers, offering a rare sliver of good news even as hope fades for many others still unaccounted for.
The Nepalese Foreign Ministry said 590 foreign nationals from 39 countries remain unaccounted for following the August 26 floods. Authorities have confirmed 324 foreigners were rescued, and a small number of those still missing have sent messages by phone or email over the past few days to let people know they survived.
The overall death toll in Nepal now stands at 1,118 people, with 3,900 still missing. Across the border, China has reported 21 dead and 541 missing in Tibet, including 104 Nepalis, 49 Indians and 33 Latvians who had been traveling with tour groups visiting sacred mountains in the region.
In Nepal, much of the rescue effort is concentrated on tunnels beneath the country’s numerous hydropower plants, where roughly 900 missing workers are believed to have sought shelter from the floodwaters, only to be trapped by debris and rising water. Two of those plants have been seen as especially promising sites, after rescuers detected signs of air still reaching the underground tunnels through pipes. India, China and the United States have all sent tunnel rescue specialists to help.
Amshu Kiran Shahi, a board member of the Nepal Electricity Authority, told Reuters on Wednesday the company remains “very confident that there is life” inside the plants, noting they were built to withstand natural disasters and stocked with food and water.
“The hope of finding survivors is decreasing. We pray and are hopeful. Hope is hope,” said Phanindra Paudel, a Nepalese emergency operations official.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah called the flooding “one of the major disasters experienced by human civilization.”
“Our priority remains clear: to continue our search and rescue operations, find those who are still missing and continue supporting everyone affected,” Shah said.
Funerals Without Bodies
In hard-hit communities such as Devighat in the Nuwakot district, Hindu families have begun holding symbolic funerals for relatives who remain missing. Following tradition, some have burned straw effigies along swollen riverbanks, a practice believed to grant spiritual release to the dead even without a physical body present for cremation.
Nepalese authorities have buried hundreds of unidentified victims in mass graves, ringing the makeshift cemeteries with barbed wire. Officials say they are preserving DNA samples and photographs in hopes of identifying the dead later so families can eventually hold proper funerals.
The force of the flooding carried victims far beyond Nepal’s borders — nearly a dozen bodies have turned up hundreds of miles away in India. Many others washed downstream into the Chitwan district, where local morgues have space for only about three dozen bodies.
Morticians there tried to improvise cold storage in a government hall using dry ice while awaiting freezers that never arrived in time, forcing authorities to resort to temporary mass burials.
“We’re still finding 15 to 20 new bodies every day. This will keep going on for months,” a Chitwan police officer told the New York Times on Sunday.
