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A devastating flash flood has torn through a mountain district on Nepal's border with Tibet, killing at least 19 people and leaving more than 380 travellers — most of them foreign visitors — out of contact, authorities said Wednesday.
According to the Nepal Tourism Board, a preliminary tally compiled from tourism operators and travel agencies has identified 384 travellers reported missing from the affected areas, among them 291 foreign nationals and 93 Nepalis. Officials stressed that teams were working to establish the whereabouts of everyone listed.
Nepali police spokesperson Abi Narayan Kafle said 19 bodies had been recovered so far, adding that rescue and relief operations were being coordinated around the clock. In a troubling sign of the disaster's reach, he noted that even members of the police force had lost contact in the aftermath.
Footage circulated by police and other social media users captured churning walls of muddy water surging through Himalayan valleys in the district bordering China, tearing apart anything in their path.
Suman Chalise, a 34-year-old teacher who witnessed the torrent in Nuwakot district, described watching the flood carry off trucks, homes and people within moments. He called the scale of destruction heart-wrenching, saying he had never seen anything like it before.
Earlier, the police spokesperson acknowledged that authorities could not yet gauge the full extent of the damage but said warnings had been issued urging residents living close to riverbanks to move to safer ground. Images from the aftermath showed wrecked houses and vehicles strewn along the banks of the Trishuli River in Nuwakot district.
The Nepali Army said it had dispatched helicopters and specialist disaster response teams to the stricken region to assist with search and evacuation efforts.
Critical infrastructure has also suffered heavily. The Nepal Electricity Authority said roughly 430 megawatts of generation capacity — spanning hydropower plants and solar installations — had been damaged, disrupting production as well as transmission and distribution networks and cutting electricity supplies to affected areas.
Scientists are beginning to piece together what triggered the deluge. Sarthak Shrestha, a remote sensing and geo-information analyst at Kathmandu-based research body ICIMOD, said an initial assessment found "no anomalies" on the Chinese side of the border. His working hypothesis is that a rock-ice avalanche occurred within Nepal, damming the Lhende river until it burst and unleashed the cascading flood downstream.
Across the frontier, Chinese authorities reported severe consequences of their own. State broadcaster CCTV said a mudslide on the Nepalese slope caused major casualties and left people missing at the Gyirong Port crossing in Tibet, airing footage of fast-moving water laden with branches and debris engulfing a road. State news agency Xinhua reported that President Xi Jinping had ordered "all-out" rescue efforts, though Beijing gave no figures for casualties. Citing CCTV, Xi said the priority was to search for and rescue the missing, treat the injured swiftly and keep the death toll as low as possible.
Traffic officials in Tibet's Shigatse region warned on social media that roads nearby remained vulnerable to further mudslides and were unsafe for travel. The disaster zone sits near a route with a history of such events: in July of last year, 17 people disappeared when a mudslide struck close to the Gyirong Port.
Monsoon rains drenching South Asia from June through September routinely unleash floods and landslides across the region, and this week's catastrophe underscores once again how deadly the season can be in Nepal's fragile mountain terrain. With hundreds still unaccounted for and highways closed across the affected districts, officials cautioned that the human toll could yet rise.
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