The photojournalist never opened his camera case. Suman Nepali of Nepali Times sat on a slope above the river and looked at two children: five-year-old Kirti Tamang, bruised and in shock, who had watched her mother and sister carried off by the flood before she herself was flung onto the hillside and later found in the forest with two other children, and who has not been able to speak since; and a boy from her school, Biswas Tamang, more badly bruised, his school ID still hanging around his neck. It was the 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 picture seemed disrespectful, the photographer wrote. All he could do was bear witness.
Thirteen days after the 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 departed. Some families whose relatives are still missing held symbolic funerals: 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 government ceremony. Phanindra Paudel of the National Emergency Operation Centre told Reuters that no state programmes had been organised, because search and rescue was still under way in the flood-hit areas. President Ram Chandra Paudel, the ceremonial head of state, travelled out to the affected districts to see the damage for himself.
What kept 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 roughly 170 metres inside the Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel in Rasuwa district. They heard voices before they reached them. Home Minister Sudan Gurung named them: Sanjay Shah, 30, a mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor. Local television showed the first of them caked 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 in the river’s upper reaches. He had no visible injuries and his vital signs were stable, though he showed signs of mild hypothermia. Army footage showed him receiving emergency medical care inside a helicopter.
The arithmetic of who might still be down there is grim and imprecise. Rescue work has narrowed onto 12 hydropower projects where about 900 workers are missing and roughly 500 are thought to be trapped in tunnels. Army rescue teams put the number possibly inside the tunnel network at around 121 of the 900; the others may have been working elsewhere on the plants, outside the vast 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 believed 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 tempo 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. He told AFP, on his way to Nepal, that he was seeing the glass as three-quarters full, and that after a week of round-the-clock heartache they might, just, be back in miracle country. Diggers had cleared 50 to 60 metres of debris. Less than an hour later, the two men were out.
The families are not consoled. In Kathmandu they gathered near the prime minister’s office and key ministries to demand that the search be sped up for the hundreds who had been working at hydropower plants and 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 gone into 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 unforeseeable. Nepal sits below more than 5,000 Himalayan glacier lakes held back by potentially unstable moraine dams. Researchers counting outburst floods worldwide found the annual rate climbing from 5.2 a year in the 1980s to 15.2 a year in the 2010s, tracking global air temperature with a lag of roughly two decades. A 2023 appraisal of the Third Pole found intensified outburst activity 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, 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.