Australians race to Nepal as 41 remain missing in devastating glacier flood

At a teaching hospital in Kathmandu, photographs of the dead line a back wall. Every few hours, Nepalese authorities add new images—faces caked in mud, bodies that could be sleeping if not for the devastation covering them. Some are so damaged that recognition would be impossible even for those who knew them well. A young woman named Saluja stood among more than a hundred people studying the pictures, searching for her cousin. He worked at a hydropower plant in the valley. Since Wednesday, when a glacier high in the Himalayas collapsed and sent a wall of water, ice, and rock down the mountain, no one has heard from him.

The flood destroyed everything in its path across three Nepalese districts and into the Tibet border region. The confirmed death toll has reached 669, with nearly 3,000 people missing. On the Chinese side of the border, more than 550 are unaccounted for. Forty-two Australians remain missing, including six identified by Chinese authorities. One of them was Michael Keats, a New South Wales man who reached the Nepal-Tibet border at Gyirong Port just ten minutes before the disaster struck. His family released a statement saying confusion about the timing had initially given them hope he was safe in Kathmandu, preparing to fly home. "He is gentle and kind, with a unique light that touches everyone lucky enough to know him," they wrote.

Since Wednesday, Kathmandu has filled not with tourists but with relatives of the missing. Saluja's older cousin, a doctor in Australia, and his wife, a dentist, were boarding planes to return home. They wanted to search hospitals and morgues, but more than that, they wanted to be with their family. Across the city, at hospitals and morgues, people gathered in clusters, holding phones up to photographs on the walls, sending videos to other relatives overseas, comparing images, trying to determine if the person in the picture was someone they loved. Each body had a piece of paper placed on top of it, noting which district it was found in and a number to call.

The Nepalese government deployed approximately 15,000 personnel—soldiers, police, rescue workers—to move up the valley into the devastated areas. They faced impossible conditions: entire regions cut off from the outside world, roads destroyed, bridges washed away, and a new lake threatening to burst. Sagar Shrestha, director of the Disaster and Crisis Management Department at the Nepal Red Cross Society, said survivors were still being found. Some had climbed into the mountains and were being helicoptered out. Others were discovered in the jungle. But he warned that the death toll could climb into the thousands.

The immediate crisis had shifted from rescue to what Shrestha called "the dignified management of the dead." Morgues and hospitals had filled to capacity in some areas. Officials in the Chitwan district planned to collect DNA samples from 229 bodies that were already decomposing and no longer identifiable, then bury them. Without proper management of the remains, Shrestha said, health issues could follow. Sagar Pandey, chief executive of the Himalaya Glacier Company, had been moving between hospitals and morgues for days, barely sleeping. Forty-seven people from his trekking service were lost, including fifteen Australians. He had clients in two locations: five people 1.5 kilometers from the Tibet-Nepal border who were supposed to return after breakfast, and ten others who had left the Syabrubesi valley driving toward the border checkpoint. All three vehicles were missing. "I believe they were trapped," Pandey said. He was also grieving his brother, who had been guiding one of the treks.

One piece of hope emerged on Saturday afternoon when Australian woman Cara Severino was found safe. Consular officials had worked out where she was and reached her by four-wheel drive. In a statement, Severino described escaping by teaming up with other survivors and using a tractor to drive out of the national park. "We passed a guy hiking up to Thulu Safru who lost his whole family when their whole town was destroyed," she said. "It's just so devastating and undeserving." She added that her heart went out to Nepalese families grieving their loved ones and that she understood what the families of the still-missing were going through.

Australian Ambassador to Nepal Simon Ernst was waiting at the airport on Saturday afternoon as six additional members of Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade crisis response team arrived. He described the scale of the infrastructure damage: power generation capability destroyed, phone lines down, telegraph poles toppled. Even Nepalese military forces had lost contact with some of their own personnel. The search and recovery operation was inherently dangerous—people were in water and mud, vulnerable to further flooding if heavy rainfall came, which was possible given the monsoon season. Most Australians had last been heard from in the uppermost district, which was hit first by the flood. The district closest to Kathmandu had been easier to search because of better road access and a wider valley. No one could say how long the full search would take. Ernst said families should feel confident that both governments were doing everything possible to find their loved ones, and that they could maintain contact with the Department of Foreign Affairs through Canberra or directly with the embassy in Kathmandu.