Nepal flood toll reaches 1,355 as the country marks a day of mourning

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put the death toll from the 26 August flash floods at 1,355 on Monday. Rescue teams are still looking for 4,996 people. That list includes 589 foreign nationals. Thirteen thousand three hundred and ninety-six people have been pulled out alive.

The district ledger is grim and specific. Chitwan has recovered 363 bodies. Nawalparasi East has 222, Nawalparasi West 221, Nuwakot 197, Rasuwa 169, Gorkha 75, Dhading 70, Tanahu 38. At least 85 of the dead in Nepal are children. About 500 recovered bodies were incomplete, which has slowed identification. Monday was set aside as a national day of mourning.

The flood did not begin as monsoon rain on a village roof. A collapse of ice and rock on the Nepal-Tibet frontier on 26 August sent a wall of water, mud and debris down the Bhotekoshi. Houses, trucks, bridges and stretches of highway went with it. Several hydropower plants in the same valleys were gutted. Hundreds of workers are believed to be inside tunnels that the surge sealed. Indian and Chinese specialist teams are working those sites with Nepali crews.

The disaster crossed the border. Chinese figures for the Tibet side have moved through the week: Xinhua had spoken of 31 dead and more than 500 missing, including 261 foreigners from 23 countries. Later Indian tallies put the Tibet dead at 43 with 519 still unaccounted for. Combined confirmed deaths on both sides sit above 1,380. The UN had already called the event Nepal's deadliest natural disaster since the April 2015 earthquake.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah has used public posts to mark restored power and phone lines in some pockets. That restoration is patchy. Highways remain cut. Temporary bridges built by the three armies are how many of the remaining search parties move. Sniffer dogs have been added to the tunnel work. The joint command of Nepal's security forces is running the ground operation. The numbers of missing have barely moved for days, which is the statistic that should worry anyone reading a morning bulletin. When the missing list stops falling, the work has shifted from rescue to recovery.

Foreigners on the missing list include workers on the hydropower sites and travellers on the Araniko and related roads that feed the China border. A US State Department count earlier in the week still had dozens of Americans unaccounted for. India has sent both rescue crews and relief. Pakistan announced 100 tonnes of goods. Those consignments do not change the tunnel problem. The men inside the power projects are the part of this story that will decide whether Monday's 1,355 holds or climbs by hundreds.

UN agencies had already flagged 65,000 people in need of emergency water and sanitation and more than 22,000 children in need of protection when the toll was still in the 900s. Those caseloads have not shrunk because the death count rose. They have grown as more valleys became reachable and as more families walked into relief points with nothing in their hands.

The climate argument will be written elsewhere. The operational fact in Kathmandu on 7 September is simpler. Eleven days after the surge, the state can name 1,355 dead by district, cannot name 4,996 others, and has asked the country to stand still for one day while the diggers keep working in Chitwan, Rasuwa and the wrecked powerhouses upstream. Identification of the partial remains will take longer than the mourning day. So will a full count from the Chinese side of the same river.

What happens next is a function of access. Every extra kilometre of road that a temporary bridge opens gives the search a new grid square. Every tunnel that is declared empty or not empty changes the missing list by scores. Monday's figure is a snapshot, not a ceiling. The NDRRMA will issue another one when the next set of bodies is logged. That is the rhythm this disaster is in now.