The death toll from last week’s massive floods in Nepal and China surpassed 900, as army and police teams raced to reach hundreds of hydropower workers trapped inside mountain tunnels buried in mud.
Nepal’s disaster management agency said that 903 bodies had been recovered across the country, many of them found as far as 150 miles from where the flood originally hit on Wednesday. Nearly 4,250 people are missing, including hundreds of workers at hydroelectric projects.
At least 16 people have died in China’s Tibet region and around 550 are missing, according to Chinese authorities.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is in Kyrgyzstan for a regional summit, said on Monday that the country is sparing no effort in the search for missing people.
In Nepal, more than 20,000 army, police and paramilitary personnel are involved in rescue operations, and more than 9,000 people have been evacuated, mainly by airlift, Nepal Prime Minister Balendra Shah said in a Facebook post Sunday. The floods are the first major crisis Shah has confronted since being elected in a landslide on a wave of Gen Z discontent earlier this year.
“We are working day and night for the survival and relief of every citizen in the affected area by putting the entire state machinery on a war footing,” he said.
Rescue operations are at critical stages at several sprawling tunnels in hydropower projects, many of which the tiny Himalayan country added just in the past decade.
When part of a glacier detached in the Langtang mountain range near Nepal’s border with China, sending an avalanche of rock and ice crashing down, the debris-laden flood buried tunnels in dozens of feet of mud, blocking their openings.
Nepal’s army spokesman said on Monday that army engineers conducted a controlled explosion at the tunnel at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project in Nepal’s Nuwakot area and that two excavators airlifted to the location were clearing away mud and debris at a depth of about 30 feet.
On Sunday, a rescue team rappelled over a hole blasted into a section of the tunnel and called out but received no response from inside, the prime minister’s office said.
At another hydropower tunnel, Nepali rescuers and foreign nationals reached about 330 feet inside a tunnel only to find it completely blocked, the army spokesman said.
Tunnel experts from India, China and South Korea are in Nepal to help with rescue efforts. Geologists and other experts are also assisting from abroad.
Some 280 hydropower workers have been rescued.
In China, rescue teams were able to restore some mobile communications at the Gyirong Port, the checkpoint on China’s side of the border crossing with Nepal, which was engulfed by a wall of water that appears to have razed most of the buildings there. Communications infrastructure and roads were also washed away.
But with the valley where the port area is located buried in more than 40 feet of mud, rescue operations are risky and no survivors have been found at the location.
More than 500 foreign tourists were among the missing in Nepal, while around 260 foreign nationals were missing in China. A total of 80 Americans are missing in Nepal and Tibet, many of them pilgrims who were visiting sacred lakes revered by Hindus and Buddhists.