KATHMANDU — The combined death toll from last week's Himalayan flash flood passed 1,000 on Tuesday, and a rescue team that entered one of the mud-filled hydropower tunnels along Nepal's Trishuli River retreated after finding no one alive, as officials in the downstream district of Chitwan began temporary burials of unidentified victims pending DNA testing.
Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put the country's confirmed dead at 1,003 and the missing at 3,916, including 583 foreigners, Al Jazeera reported. Chinese state media placed Tibet's toll at 16 dead and 546 missing, including 261 foreigners. Both figures rose from Monday's count of 903 dead and 4,247 missing.
More than 600 of those still missing are workers believed trapped in a network of mud-choked tunnels at hydropower sites along the Trishuli, the BBC reported. Only 4 percent of the roughly 900 bodies recovered so far have been identified, a Ministry of Health spokesperson told the broadcaster. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said 279 workers have been pulled from the sites and more than 11,000 people from the wider disaster zone.
Inside the tunnels
Engineers began pumping air into the tunnels over the weekend, and crews entered one leading to a hydropower plant on Monday but withdrew after finding no one there. Australian tunneling expert Arnold Dix, who is advising Nepalese authorities remotely, told BBC Radio 4's World at One that rescuers have struggled even to locate the buried facilities. "The actual signature of them has gone – everything is just missing. It looks like a lunar landscape," said Dix, a former head of the International Tunnelling Association.
Families said the operation is moving too slowly. "The longer it takes, the more our hope dies. This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us," Jiban Khadka, whose relative is trapped, told the Nepalese daily Kantipur. Sita Pandey, whose husband was at a plant when the floods hit, told the same paper, "I still have a 50% hope that he is alive because there is an oxygen system inside."
Makeshift graves
In Chitwan, a district far downstream, river systems carried nearly 300 bodies to their banks over the weekend. Chief District Officer Ganesh Aryaal told BBC Nepali that authorities had begun burying unidentified remains after extracting DNA samples. "We don't have enough freezers here... We had to choose this last alternative of temporary burial system. We are really overwhelmed," Aryaal said. Relatives will be able to retrieve the remains once matches are made, he added.
In Tibet, the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama held a memorial service as crews waded through waist-high mud at what had been a border crossing with Nepal.
Independent verification from the Tibetan side remains constrained. Chinese authorities have imposed "administrative penalties" — fines, warnings and short detentions — on people speculating online that casualties exceed the reported numbers, according to the BBC, and Nepalese authorities have ordered the removal of what they deem misinformation about the disaster.
Rescue teams from China, Nepal, India, Korea and Australia are expected to keep searching the tunnels this week as monsoon rains push the Trishuli higher again.