Nepal Flooding Death Toll Rises as Remote Villages Cut Off From Aid

On Wednesday, a wall of water came down the Trisuli River and erased villages from the map. By Thursday morning, Nepal's government was still counting the dead—hundreds confirmed, with more than 1,300 people unaccounted for. The full picture of what had happened remained fragmented, pieced together from phone calls that got through before the networks died, from people who made it to higher ground, from the silence of those who didn't.

Bidhya Rajput, a journalist living in Sole village in Nuwakot District, watched her home disappear into the flood. She told reporters that only four or five people from her village managed to escape by running toward the hills. The rest had no time. The water came too fast, too high, too sudden. Her husband's parents were among the missing. His father, a teacher, may have been caught on his way home from school—the principal thought so, but no one knew for certain. By Thursday morning, there was no electricity in Sole, no mobile signal, no way to confirm anything. Her husband had set out for the village on damaged roads to search for his family, but Rajput had heard nothing since he left. The state's rescue efforts, she said, had concentrated on the bigger cities. Sole was still waiting for help to arrive.

Three districts bore the worst of it: Nuwakot, Rasuwa, and Dhading. The Trisuli River had destroyed more than three dozen bridges—both the kind cars crossed and the suspension bridges villagers used on foot. A dozen hydropower dams were gone. Sujan Lohani, from Dhading, said he had never imagined the river could do such damage. The main bridge connecting his district to Kathmandu had been swept away. His cousin was trapped in the village. "We are disconnected from Kathmandu," he said. That disconnection—physical and electronic—was the story repeating across the region. Roads washed out. Phone lines dead. Villages isolated not just from the capital but from each other, from rescue teams, from any reliable information about who had survived.

Usha Kiran Timsena, an opposition politician from Nuwakot, said that warnings had been issued—police and local officials had told people a major flood was coming. But warnings and reality are not the same thing. Many people who lived some distance from the riverbanks didn't take the alert seriously. They didn't flee. When the water reached them, it was too late. Timsena herself had two close relatives missing since the morning the flood came. No contact since then. No updates. Just absence.

The year before, the same area had flooded. That time, villagers had made it to higher ground in time. The water hadn't risen as high. If they had received clear warning this time, if they had believed the scale of what was coming, they might have done the same. But the flood moved faster and climbed higher than anyone expected. Bikram Timilsina, Nepal's Minister for Information and Communication and a representative from the affected Nuwakot-1 constituency, was in the region when he spoke to reporters. He said the state had not prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. "Entire villages have been swept away," he said. "Many have tragically lost their lives. Many are out of contact." The government had mobilized everything it had—more than a dozen helicopters, police, military, ordinary citizens building temporary shelters. By midday Thursday, 414 people had been airlifted to safety, including 164 foreigners. But 1,300 remained missing.

Scientists were still working out what had triggered the flood. China claimed a high-altitude glacier had collapsed. Sudip Thakuri, a climate scientist at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, said preliminary evidence pointed to an avalanche on the Nepal-China border that had blocked a river flowing south from Tibet. When that avalanche dam gave way, it may have also released a subglacial lake downstream, unleashing a cascade of water. Rijan Raj Kayastha, another climate scientist at Kathmandu University, warned that other glacial lakes in the region posed a risk of further flooding. Chinese authorities reported that a lake in Tibet's Gyirong, upstream from the flooded areas in Nepal, was already overflowing. Another three million tons of water were expected to flow into it over the next three days. India and China were coordinating with Nepal on the response, but the immediate crisis was still unfolding—rescue teams racing against time, villages still cut off, families still waiting for word of the missing.