Nepal flood toll hits 1,252 as 4,216 remain missing after the Langtang collapse

Nepal’s police put the death toll from last month’s Himalayan flash floods at 1,252 on Thursday. Another 4,216 people remain missing, among them 583 foreign nationals. Rescuers have pulled 11,993 people to safety. More than 5,100 have been listed as injured. The numbers come from the ninth day of joint army, police and Indian specialist searches along the Trishuli and Bhotekoshi valleys.

The disaster began on 26 August, when a glacier on Langtang Lirung fractured at about 5,200 metres. Ice, rock and meltwater dropped into the valleys and became a debris flow that crossed the Nepal-China border. Chinese authorities have separately reported 16 dead and 546 missing in Tibet, including 261 foreigners. Combined, the two official tallies now sit above 1,260 confirmed dead and well above 4,700 missing.

Bodies recovered on the Nepalese side are concentrated in eight districts. Chitwan accounts for 355. Nawalparasi East has 218. Nawalparasi West has 208, including 18 recovered on the Indian side of the border and handed back. Nuwakot has 177. Rasuwa has 127. Gorkha 69, Dhading 60 and Tanahu 38. Those figures will keep moving as search teams reach houses that were buried rather than washed away.

Hydropower sites are the other focus. About 900 workers were listed missing from 12 projects in the first days. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said 279 of them have been brought out. At Upper Trishuli-3B, a 37-megawatt plant, 191 people were still unaccounted for in mid-week updates. Rasuwagadhi, 111 megawatts, had 93 missing. Langtang Khola, 20 megawatts, had 41 feared inside a tunnel. An Indian tunnel team has established a foothold at Chilime and probed about 185 metres at Langtang.

Shah has tied the collapse to a warming Himalaya. He has also said more than $42 million in aid has arrived and that he expects the figure to rise. The United States has flown in specialised recovery kits. Australia has sent drones. Families of the missing have begun symbolic cremations where no body can be produced. Police in Kathmandu have already buried unidentified dead in trenches at the Gokarna forest reserve.

Roads and bridges along the Trishuli are gone in stretches. In Bidur, Nuwakot, residents now pull a steel cable across the river so people can slide from one bank to the other. Power and telephone lines have been restored in some pockets and not in others. Heavy rain has continued to interrupt work.

Foreigners among the missing come from more than 30 countries. That fact has pulled the disaster onto the consular desks of governments that rarely handle mass-casualty work in the high Himalaya. It has also exposed how many seasonal workers, trekkers and hydropower contractors were in the same narrow valleys when the glacier failed.

Langtang is a trekking corridor, a hydropower corridor and a border crossing at Gyirong. Satellite frames released after 26 August show the riverbed rewritten in a single afternoon. A brown scar sits where a road and a settlement used to sit. The scientific sequence is no longer in dispute among the agencies on the ground. A high glacier failed. A debris flow followed the river corridors. Settlements and powerhouses built on those corridors took the impact.

What remains open is how many people are still inside tunnels that have not been fully entered, and how Nepal will rebuild a set of plants that supplied a large share of its domestic power. Search dogs and helicopters will keep working through the weekend. The missing list is still longer than the confirmed dead. Until those two columns move toward each other, the official disaster remains incomplete.