The photojournalist never opened his camera case. Suman Nepali of Nepali Times sat on a slope above the river and watched two children. One was five-year-old Kirti Tamang, bruised and in shock. She had seen her mother and sister carried away by the flood before she was thrown onto the hillside, and she was later found in the forest with two other children. She has not been able to speak since. The other was a boy from her school, Biswas Tamang, more badly bruised, with his school ID still hanging around his neck. It was that ID that allowed his teachers to reach his mother, who lives in a neighbouring district and had sent him to an English-medium public school in Betrawati. Taking a photograph felt disrespectful, the photographer wrote. All he could do was bear witness.
Thirteen days after ice, rock and mud came down the China-Nepal border on 26 August, Nepal lowered its flags. Monday was the last day of mourning in Hindu rites, when close family stay at home, relatives visit, and rituals are held for the dead. Some families whose relatives are still missing held symbolic funerals, because cremation is the essential final rite and performing it without a body offers some spiritual release. Candlelight vigils were planned for the evening. The death toll had reached at least 1,398, with more than 5,500 missing, around 800 of them foreigners.
There was no state ceremony. Phanindra Paudel of the National Emergency Operation Centre told Reuters that no official programmes had been organised, because search and rescue work was still going on in the flood-hit areas. President Ram Chandra Paudel, the ceremonial head of state, travelled to the affected districts to see the damage for himself.
What stopped the day from being purely a funeral was what had happened underground over the previous three days. On Friday, nine days after the flood, rescuers reached two men about 170 metres inside the Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel in Rasuwa district. They heard voices before they reached them. Home Minister Sudan Gurung gave their names: Sanjay Shah, 30, a mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor. Local television showed the first of them covered in mud, carried out on a rescuer’s shoulder. Both were stable and were flown to hospital in Kathmandu.
Then came a third. The Nepali army said Lu Haitao had been brought out of a 225-metre tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project, ten days after the glacier collapsed higher up the river. He had no visible injuries and his vital signs were stable, although he showed signs of mild hypothermia. Army footage showed him receiving emergency medical care inside a helicopter.
How many people may still be underground is unclear. Rescue work has narrowed onto 12 hydropower projects where about 900 workers are missing and roughly 500 are believed to be trapped in tunnels. Army teams estimate that around 121 of the 900 may be inside the tunnel network, while others may have been working elsewhere on the plants, outside the huge underground system. Among Monday’s targets were four of the six people missing at the Chilime hydropower project in badly hit Rasuwa district, who could still be alive, according to Shri Ram Neupane, a member of parliament involved in the rescue. Officials had obtained specialised equipment and worked out the techniques needed at Chilime. Rescuers believe survivors are possible because many of the tunnels contain air pockets. At Trishuli 3A alone, the Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal counts at least 557 workers missing, with about 115 thought to be in the main tunnel.
“We are facing something I have never faced before,” the Australian tunnel rescue expert Arnold Dix wrote on social media on Monday. “Not one rescue, but multiple potential rescues, unfolding at the same time, in different places, each with its own dangers, uncertainties, and lives that may still be saved.” Dix, president of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, advised during the rescue of 41 men trapped for 17 days in the collapsed Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand in 2023. “We are measured not only by the lives we save, but by the lives we refuse to abandon,” he said. “Silkyara taught me never to confuse unlikely with impossible.” Specialised teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States are working through debris, damaged structures and tunnels. Nepal’s army spokesman, Raja Ram Basnet, said the effort was continuing at the same speed as on day one, on the ground, from the air and in the tunnels, to make sure nobody was still stranded.
Before Friday’s breakthrough, Dix had described teams calling into the Trishuli 3A tunnel: “Don’t worry, we are rescuing you.” They believed a faint reply came back, hunchha, yes or okay. Speaking to AFP on his way to Nepal, he said that after a week of round-the-clock heartache they might, just, be close to a miracle. Diggers had cleared 50 to 60 metres of debris. Less than an hour later, the two men were out.
The families are not comforted. In Kathmandu they gathered near the prime minister’s office and key ministries to demand a faster search for the hundreds of workers at hydropower plants who were either swept away by the Bhotekhoshi river or buried by debris. “We have a lot of hope,” said Reena, whose brother is missing. “They say they are doing rescue. If the rescue is there, where’s the result? We need the result.” Mortuaries have overflowed. Police say hundreds of bodies have been placed in mass graves after DNA samples were taken for later identification, and only about 100 have been identified and returned to families. Thirty-six Australians are among the missing.
None of this was impossible to foresee. Nepal lies below more than 5,000 Himalayan glacier lakes, held back by walls of loose rock and earth left behind by glaciers, which can give way. Researchers who counted such floods worldwide found the rate rising from 5.2 a year in the 1980s to 15.2 a year in the 2010s, following global air temperatures about two decades later. A 2023 study of the Himalayan region found more of these floods in southeastern Tibet and along the China-Nepal border over the past decade, with 105 hydropower projects among the infrastructure at risk.
In Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong, hundreds of Nepalis lit candles and laid flowers in a community hall on Monday. Satish Gurung, the acting consul general, told them it was a very difficult time. He put the toll at 1,355 dead and 4,996 missing, said the disaster had been driven in part by global warming in the mountains, and asked for more than aid and charity: for climate justice.