Nepal flood death toll hits 579 as rescuers race to find 2,500+ missing

On Wednesday morning, the ground shook beneath the Himalayan border between Nepal and China. What followed was not a flood in any ordinary sense—it was a wall of dark water and debris, moving with such force that survivors compared it to a tsunami or a wall of fire. A section of glacier high in the mountains had collapsed, taking bedrock with it in a rockfall so violent it registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event. The rocks and meltwater suddenly swelled the rivers below into torrents that swept away buildings, bridges, and entire villages in their path.

By Friday, the confirmed death toll had reached 579 people across Nepal and China. More than 2,500 were missing—1,924 in Nepal alone, with 558 on the Chinese side. Some local media outlets suggested the number could be as high as 12,000, though no official authority confirmed that figure. The Red Cross estimated that roughly 90,000 people had been affected by the disaster in some way. Rescue teams had managed to pull more than 3,700 people to safety, many of them airlifted by helicopter to Kathmandu and other locations. But the work was far from over, and the danger was far from past.

Karbir Gaire, a customs officer in Timure, the Nepalese village closest to the Chinese border, was at his desk around 8 a.m. when the ground began to shake. He felt it first, then saw what he described as a black storm bearing down on the office building. He and his colleagues ran. Within seconds, they were climbing uphill on the opposite side of the structure. Gaire believed those ten seconds saved his life. Fifteen of his colleagues were missing. Timure, which had been home to more than 1,500 people—a place with government offices, hotels, cafes, banks, schools—was buried under brown mud.

Among those caught in the initial surge were Anjana Raja and Pattabiraman Venkatesan, a couple from the San Francisco Bay Area who were traveling by tour bus toward the border as part of a pilgrimage to Tibet. Venkatesan saw the wall of water approaching and at first could not identify what it was. The color was wrong—dark black, not clear. He thought it might be a forest fire. The wall was 60 to 70 feet high. He and Raja abandoned the bus and ran uphill as houses collapsed around them. They spent that night in a goat shed on a mountainside with other survivors, and were airlifted out the next day. "The fact that we survived is nothing short of a miracle," Venkatesan said.

Hundreds of the missing were foreign nationals—trekkers, workers, and pilgrims who had come to the region for various reasons. The Isha Foundation, a volunteer organization that runs spiritual pilgrimages, reported that about 80 of its members were unaccounted for. Twenty-two of them were Americans, all adults: thirteen women and nine men. They had been part of a larger group of roughly 1,000 people on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a sacred site for Hindus, Buddhists, and others. One of the missing was Sridevi Vejella, a U.S. citizen whose husband, Deepak Dandu, said the pilgrimage had been her lifelong dream. She was crossing from China into Nepal at Gyirong Port when the flood struck. Dandu was preparing to fly to India to be with their son, who was struggling with the news.

Rescue operations continued under high alert. In Rasuwa, army personnel were working to extract people trapped inside a hydropower tunnel that was part of the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project. Video footage showed rescuers pulling mud-caked survivors out of the tunnel entrance. Army spokesperson Brigadier General Raja Ram Basnet told the Associated Press that the challenge was immense: everything had been covered by mud, making it difficult to locate entry and exit points. "Our first priority is rescuing the stranded people," he said.

But there was another threat emerging. Authorities in both Nepal and China warned that a new lake had formed upstream behind a dam created by debris from the initial floods. The Nepal Police issued a fresh alert after receiving information that this barrier lake was overflowing. Chinese state media reported the lake was more than six miles from Gyirong Port, sitting at an elevation of 9,680 feet—roughly 3,280 feet above the port itself. The risk of secondary flooding was real. Later, Chinese state media said the flood risks from the overflowing lake were deemed manageable, but rescue teams remained on high alert, ready to move to safety if necessary.

Scientists studying satellite imagery concluded that bedrock beneath a glacier had given way, and the lower portion of the glacier had come with it. Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria currently based in Bangladesh, described the satellite images as showing what looked like "someone cut with a huge knife through the whole lower part" of the rock and ice. The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is warming rapidly. Around 78 percent of the glacier area between roughly 14,760 and 19,685 feet above sea level is highly exposed to that warming. Steiner offered a grim assessment: "What happened yesterday is unfortunately the new normal. It's going to get worse from here onwards."