Nepal mourns 1,344 flood dead as tunnel crews still search

Nepal is observing national mourning on the thirteenth day after an ice-and-rock avalanche on the Tibet border sent a surge down the Bhotekoshi on 26 August. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has put the Nepali death toll at 1,344, with about 4,900 to 5,000 people still missing, including 589 foreign nationals. More than 13,400 people have been pulled out. Across the border in Gyirong county, Chinese officials have reported 43 dead and 519 missing. Combined confirmed deaths stand near 1,387.

The missing include hundreds of hydropower workers believed to be inside mud-filled tunnels along the Trishuli. Eleven projects, finished or under construction, were damaged. Since Friday three men have come out of those tunnels alive: Kabir Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor, and Sanjay Sah, 30, a foreman, from Trishuli 3A; and a Chinese national from a tunnel on Upper Trishuli I after ten days. An Indian tunnel team working with the Nepal Army cut a temporary track inside the Chilime tunnel in Rasuwa so heavier machines can reach the face.

In Nuwakot, 60-year-old Chandika Shrestha was taken alive from a four-storey house after ten days under mud. Rescuers used satellite images to find one buried tunnel mouth. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said earlier that 279 people had been brought out of project sites. Teams from China, India, Korea and Australia are on the ground with the Nepal Army.

Identification is slow. A health ministry spokesperson told BBC Nepali that only about 4 percent of the first 900 recovered bodies had been named. The U.S. State Department said about 75 Americans were still unaccounted for as of mid-week. Pakistan sent 100 tonnes of relief. A UN official asked for faster access to valleys that remain cut off.

The disaster is now two problems at once. One is rescue in tunnels where families say air was pumped late, and where heavy kit still cannot reach every heading. The other is a missing-persons register that will outlast the cameras. Foreign workers on Himalayan hydro sites are a quiet labour system. Their names sit on contractor lists in Nepal, India and China. Matching those lists to bodies and to empty bunks is the work of the next month, not the next day.

The avalanche itself was a slope failure at high altitude, not a monsoon river that rose on a forecast. That distinction matters for every dam still planned on the same catchment. A wall of ice, rock and water does not respect a cofferdam. The projects that lost tunnels last week were built on the assumption that the mountain would stay in place.

Mourning on the thirteenth day follows Hindu practice. After the rites, the state still has to finish the tunnel search, publish a foreign-national missing list that consulates can use, and decide which hydro sites are recoverable. Those three files will measure whether 26 August remains an emergency or becomes a permanent gap in the labour roll of the upper Trishuli.

India's tunnel crew at Chilime is the most concrete offer New Delhi can make on this disaster. If that track lets machines reach a live heading, the missing count will move. If it does not, the thirteenth-day rites will have marked the turn from rescue to recovery.