A Mountain Fell on Wednesday Morning. Nepal Is Still Counting.
A glacier collapsed above the Langtang valley and sent a wall of ice and rock down the Trishuli. Three days later, 676 are confirmed dead, nearly 3,000 are missing, and the lakes it left behind have not finished draining.
- A glacier near Langtang Lirung collapsed on Wednesday 26 August, touching off an ice-and-rock avalanche and a landslide that tore down the Trishuli corridor with no warning of any kind.
- As of Saturday, at least 676 people are confirmed dead across Nepal and Tibet and nearly 3,000 are still missing, including more than 540 foreign nationals.
- The Red Cross puts the number of people in urgent need at 93,000. UNICEF counts 17,000 children affected. More than 10,000 households need shelter tonight.
- Nepal's finance minister estimates rebuilding at $4-5 billion, close to a tenth of the national economy, in a country that is still paying for the 2015 earthquake.
- It is not over: two lakes formed by the debris are still draining, and there was no monitoring on that glacier because nobody had ever paid to put any there.
What They're Not Telling You
This is being filed as a weather story, and it isn't one. There was no instrument on that glacier and no warning system in that valley — not because Nepal was careless, but because a country facing a $5 billion recovery bill cannot fund a Himalayan monitoring network out of its own pocket, and nobody else offered to. The other detail nobody is leading with: a community of 250 households swept away this week was made up of families resettled onto the Trishuli floodplain after the 2015 earthquake. They lost everything twice, eleven years apart, because the floodplain was the only flat ground on offer.
See how Reuters: Nepal's flood damage may cost up to a tenth of economy to rebuild framed it →When the Reuters team found him, the boy was eight years old, his right leg was broken, his face was scratched and bruised, and nobody at the fifteen-bed hospital in Nuwakot could tell them where his family was.
In his left hand he was holding two ten-rupee notes. The police officers who pulled him out had given him the money to persuade him to come with them. Twenty rupees. About fourteen cents. He had been at school on Wednesday morning when the valley went dark, and he had run into the forest with a friend and climbed a tree, and that is why he was alive.
His name is Zoyal Ghale. Asked whether he had been frightened, he shook his head. No.
Two districts away, his mother was on her fourth shelter, reading lists of names that did not have her sons on them.
What Came Down the Mountain
On Wednesday, 26 August, the lower section of a glacier near the Langtang Lirung peak broke away and fell into the valley below. Videos shared on social media and independently verified by Reuters show the collapse touching off an avalanche of ice and rock, which in turn triggered a massive landslide.
What reached the villages was not water in the way most people picture a flood. It was a moving wall of rock, ice, mud and shattered forest, funneled by some of the steepest terrain on the planet and moving at a speed nothing living outruns. It crossed the border region between Nepal and China's Tibet Autonomous Region and poured down the Trishuli river corridor. Within minutes, whole communities were gone.
There was no warning. There was no siren, no phone alert, no ten minutes to get the children up the hill. Matti Maya Tamang, Zoyal's mother, was weaving at home when she heard something she took for an earthquake.
"I could see everything was being swept away. I thought my children were getting swept away too."
She tried to drive to the school. It is normally fifteen or twenty minutes. She could not find it, because the landmarks she would have used to find it were no longer there.
"You could not understand where the school was, where the market was. There was only water, stones and mud everywhere."
Every figure in this article is attributed to a named source and linked in the text: Reuters reporting from Kathmandu, Nuwakot and Beijing; the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; UNICEF; the World Health Organization; the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction; and Nepal's own finance and foreign ministries. These numbers are moving. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than picking the bigger figure.
The Count, and Why It Keeps Changing
As of Saturday, 29 August, Reuters reports at least 669 people confirmed dead in Nepal and seven in Tibet. Nepali police have put their own count slightly higher, near 675. Both figures are rising, and neither is the number that matters most.
The number that matters most is this one: nearly 3,000 people are still missing. About 2,426 in Nepal. About 554 in Tibet's Gyirong County. Among them are at least 540 foreign nationals, many of them Hindu pilgrims from India who had traveled the same road thousands travel every year. Ninety-one Malaysian citizens are listed as uncontactable. World Vision reported at least 65 Americans among the missing in the first days after the flood.
"Missing," three days on, in that terrain, is a word that is doing a great deal of quiet work. Families know what it means. They are saying it anyway, because the alternative is to stop saying it.
Beyond the dead and the missing, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimates that at least 93,000 people are directly affected and in great need. UNICEF counts more than 17,000 children impacted across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading. More than 10,000 households along the Trishuli corridor need emergency shelter right now. The WHO says six health facilities were damaged and eight health workers are missing — meaning the people whose job was to treat the wounded are themselves among the unaccounted for.
A Corridor, Not a Town
This did not happen to one place. It happened to a line drawn down a river.
Rasuwa district, roughly 80 kilometers north of Kathmandu, took the first and worst of it — Timure, Rasuwagadhi, Syabrubesi, the trailhead village that trekkers and climbers and pilgrims pass through on their way into the Langtang valley. Then Nuwakot: Betrawati, Trishuli Bazaar, Devighat. Then downstream into Dhading, Gorkha and Chitwan, the surge losing height and gaining nothing in mercy.
On the Chinese side, the Gyirong border crossing complex — a working port between Tibet and Nepal, with staff and traders and travelers in it — was reduced to rubble. The first rescue team and a search dog reached it on Friday afternoon, roping through forest and down cliffs because the roads were gone. Surveillance footage from the crossing shows water and debris swallowing the buildings while people were still trying to run.
The Two Hundred and Fifty Households
There is one detail in this disaster that should stop anyone reading it cold.
In April 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal and destroyed more than half a million homes. Some of the families it displaced were resettled afterward. A number of them were resettled on the low-lying banks of the Trishuli River, because that is where flat, buildable ground exists in a country that is mostly vertical.
According to Mona Sherpa, country director of CARE Nepal, one such community — 250 households — has now been swept away entirely.
These were people who had already lost everything once, eleven years ago. They were rehoused by a system doing its honest best with the land it had. And the land it had was the floodplain.
That is not a story about Nepali incompetence. It is a story about what happens when a poor country in the most seismically and glacially violent terrain on earth has to put families somewhere, and every option is a bad option, and it picks the least bad one, and the least bad one is still the river.
The Hardest Work Being Done Right Now
Three days in, the bodies coming out of the debris are not always identifiable. Nepal's district authorities have started saying so publicly, which takes a kind of courage that does not get written about.
"DNA samples will be collected, and the bodies will be buried in an open space," the Chitwan district administration said in a notice. Decomposition and the risk of a disease outbreak have overtaken the ordinary decencies. Families will be told later, by a laboratory, who they buried.
In Kathmandu, relatives have been gathering outside Maharajgunj Medical Campus, where some of the recovered have been taken. Photographs of the dead have been posted on the gates and the boundary walls. People stand and look at them, one at a time, hoping and not hoping to recognize a face.
Nepal's Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal was asked what his country needs from the world. His answer was more specific and more sobering than the usual appeal. Nepal does not need help with search and rescue, he said — Nepali crews are doing that. What it needs is technical: specialists to reach people trapped in tunnels, engineers to restore transport and communications where the bridges are gone, and forensic capacity — body identification, DNA testing, and refrigeration to store remains long enough for families to claim them.
A country asking the world for morgue capacity is telling you exactly how bad it is.
Indian tunnel experts arrived Saturday. China dispatched five, with four more to follow. India has flown in three planeloads carrying 60 tons of blankets, medicine and food, and offered prefabricated bridges. The UN released an initial $2 million from its emergency fund; the WHO sent an interagency health kit sized for 10,000 people and six multipurpose tents. The IFRC committed one million Swiss francs. The UK pledged £5 million and responders, the EU €2 million, South Korea a response team and $1 million, the United States a disaster response adviser and $500,000. Médecins Sans Frontières has a team on the ground.
Four to Five Billion Dollars
Nepal's Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle told Reuters on Saturday that rebuilding will cost between $4 billion and $5 billion.
"The initial estimate is between $4-$5 billion. Just an estimate," he said. "Loss and damage is being assessed."
That bill is close to a tenth of the entire Nepali economy. For scale: the 2015 earthquake cost about $9 billion to recover from, roughly a third of the economy, and Nepal is still not finished paying for it.
The floods tore through the three things holding that economy up. Tourism, because the Langtang trekking corridor is now a debris field. Remittances, because the families receiving them no longer have houses to spend them on. And hydropower — the damaged plants account for more than 12% of national generating capacity. A country of 30 million people just lost an eighth of its power supply in an afternoon.
It Is Not Over
The collapse left something behind. Two things, actually.
Where the debris blocked the valley, water backed up into new lakes that did not exist last week. One of them, on the Purepu Tsangpo, straddles the Nepal–China border. On Friday it overflowed into Nepal's Lhende Khola and Trishuli rivers and rescue work was suspended — relief trucks stopped where they stood, because the thing that killed 676 people could happen again downstream of the people trying to help.
By Saturday the immediate threat had eased. Chinese authorities reported the lake had shrunk to 99,000 square meters, about fourteen soccer pitches, down 21,000 since Thursday, with parts of the lake bed now visible. Radar and drones are watching it around the clock. Rescue crews downstream have been promised at least thirty minutes of warning.
But there is a second, larger body of water sitting at the foot of the collapse itself. "We estimate its area to be over 120,000 square meters, but its depth is currently unknown," said Chen Hongqi, a senior engineer with China's Geological Disaster Technical Guidance Center. Nobody knows how much water is in it.
An official with Nepal's Disaster Management Authority has said plainly that the flood risk stands until both lakes have fully drained. Rain is forecast on and off for the next three days.
Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, put it this way: "In a sense, the disaster is not yet completely over. It is still unfolding in some ways."
Why Did the Glacier Fall?
Honest answer: nobody knows yet, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
There are two leading candidates. An earthquake was recorded in the region that morning. And warming temperatures have been destabilizing high-altitude ice across the Himalaya for decades.
"We're still not absolutely sure whether it was triggered by an earthquake or by warm temperatures melting the glacier," said Benjamin Horton, dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong.
The more useful thing Horton said was about why we don't know:
"One of the reasons why we don't fully understand the mechanisms that cause the landslide is that we have a lack of data. So there has to be this investment in the science, there has to be this investment in society."
Set aside every argument you have ever had about climate policy for one minute and look at the practical failure underneath it. There was no monitoring on that glacier. There was no instrument on that slope. There was no system that could have given Matti Maya Tamang ten minutes to get to her sons' school. The technology to do that exists and is not expensive by the standards of what it protects. It simply was not there, because Nepal cannot afford it and nobody else paid for it.
A country facing a $5 billion recovery bill is not going to fund a Himalayan early-warning network out of its own pocket. That is the decision sitting in front of the rest of the world right now, and it will be made — one way or the other — long before the next glacier comes down.
If You Want to Help
Nepal has asked for specialist expertise and for money, in that order. Money is the part ordinary people can supply, and it should go to organizations already operating inside the affected districts rather than to anything that appeared on the internet this week.
UNICEF Nepal — child identification and family reunification, hygiene kits, emergency water. CARE Nepal — shelter and relief for displaced households along the Trishuli corridor. Nepal Red Cross / IFRC — the largest relief distribution network in the affected districts. World Vision Nepal — food, safe drinking water, emergency shelter kits, child protection. Médecins Sans Frontières — emergency medical teams. Give directly through each organization's own site. Verify any fundraiser that contacted you first.
The Boy With Twenty Rupees
Matti Maya Tamang had stopped believing her sons were alive. She said so, plainly, to a reporter.
"At the fourth place too, my children's names were not on the list, and they were not there. I had come to accept that both my children were no more. All I could do was weep. I couldn't hold myself together at all."
What saved her was not a system. It was a phone number. A Reuters journalist, Sahana Bajracharya, had met Zoyal at the hospital in Nuwakot, filmed him with his agreement in the hope that somebody would recognize him, and left her number behind. Hours later Tamang called it.
"When you told me that you knew where Zoyal was, it didn't sound real," she said. "I had already given up that I would find them."
She had already found her younger son. "After I found the elder one," she said, "I felt my life was back."
The buses were not running. The journalist arranged a car. On Friday, Tamang stood quietly beside a hospital bed in Kathmandu, two hours from a home that no longer exists, and looked at her son. Their father, a construction laborer working in Japan, was on his way.
Asked about the broken leg, she said something that belongs in every account of this week, because it is the sound of a human being deciding to keep going:
"Oh, he is always a mischievous kid. This is not his first broken bone."
Nearly 3,000 families are still waiting for a phone call like the one she got. Most of them will not get it.
Remember that when this story falls off the front page next week, which it will. The mountain took minutes. The counting will take months. The rebuilding will take a decade Nepal cannot pay for alone.
And a boy in a Kathmandu hospital bed is still holding on to twenty rupees, because a stranger in a uniform gave it to him on the worst day of his life and told him it would be all right.
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Rocci J. Stucci
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