Nepal's flood toll passes 1,000 as tunnel crews keep searching the silt

The death toll from the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli floods that hit Nepal and the Tibet border on 26 August has passed 1,000. Nepali and Indian tallies on 1 September put recovered bodies around 1,010. The missing still number near 3,900 to 4,000, including hundreds of foreign workers. Prime Minister Balendra Shah has said 279 people were pulled out of hydropower sites. The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said 163 Indians have been rescued and 151 have left China.

The search has moved into the tunnels. Nepali soldiers sent drones into flooded hydropower adits on 31 August. Indian tunnel specialists who reached the Upper Trishuli works last week are still on site. Chinese crews are working the upstream side. Officials in Tibet have warned of rising water again, which put Nepal back on flood alert as the first week of September opened. Temporary burials have begun in some valleys because identification is lagging behind recovery.

A 19-member Indian forensic team has started DNA sampling so that bodies can be matched to families. South Korea's foreign ministry said it will send a 44-member relief unit. The United States had already pledged $3.6 million. The problem the foreigners are being asked to solve is not only rubble. It is silt inside narrow tunnels, unstable slopes, and a list of missing that includes 592 foreign nationals in one midweek count from Nepal's disaster authority.

Reuters reported that Nepali and Chinese officials met three months before the flood to talk about glacier and monsoon risk on the same border. The May meeting called for joint work on early warning. The wall of water that came down the valley on 26 August buried neighbourhoods and worksites faster than those systems could move people. A school principal who walked 900 students out of the path has become one of the few named rescue stories in a week of mass numbers.

India's embassy in Kathmandu has published a note on identification and repatriation. Bihar issued an advisory against eating fish taken from floodwater that crossed the border. Uttarakhand, on the Indian side of the same monsoon pulse, reported seven dead and a blocked arterial highway on 1 September. The meteorological office in India had already put Odisha on a red alert and named 14 states in heavy-rain warnings as August ended.

The hydropower belt along the Nepal-China-India triangle is both the workplace and the trap. Upper Trishuli and neighbouring projects hired large crews of Indian and other migrant labour. When the river came through, the same tunnels that were supposed to carry water for turbines became the places where people could not get out. Shah has said Kathmandu should take the disaster to international forums. That is a political sentence. The operational sentence is the one coming from the tunnel mouth: the drones are still flying, the silt is still there, and the missing list has not collapsed fast enough to call the search over.

Day seven is late for live rescues and early for a finished death roll. The 1,000-body mark is a threshold for headlines. The 4,000 missing is the number that will move, up or down, as DNA labs and border lists catch up. Until those lists close, the flood is still an active casualty event, not a finished disaster.