Search and rescue operations are ongoing and the death toll continues to rise after devastating flash floods hit the Nepal–Tibet border region on Wednesday.
More than 300 bodies have been found, with hundreds more missing from dozens of countries, including 33 British citizens, in the region’s worst disaster for more than a decade.
Contradictory accounts of what caused the catastrophe emerged in the aftermath, but a clearer picture of the sequence of events is now emerging, with the floods linked to a glacial collapse.
The trigger
The Nepali government and US Geological Survey (USGS) initially said that an earthquake in the border region on Wednesday had triggered landslides that led to the flood. But the USGS later reported that the “seismic event was instead a glacial collapse” at 8:37am on Wednesday, which registered a 5.2 magnitude on the Richter Scale.
Scientists assessed, based on satellite images, that a massive sheet of ice had come loose from a Himalayan mountain and plummeted thousands of metres into a Nepali valley.
Nepalese policemen watch as earthmovers clear debris in Nepal’s Nuwakot district (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP)“It looks like a glacier in the area basically snapped off in a clean break, allowing it to fall just over a vertical kilometre to the valley bottom,” Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told The New York Times. “The bottom looks like a bomb exploded.”
The cause of the glacier collapse is unclear but scientists have warned that rising temperatures are melting ice and permafrost in the Himalayas. An analysis by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in March found this process is accelerating, with the rate of ice loss across the mountain range doubling since the year 2000.
The impact of the falling glacier unleashed a cascade of water, mud and ice that entered the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers, and then the Narayani river, according to local authorities.
The event triggered alarms in the flood-hit region. A water-level monitoring station in Rasuwa, close to the impact site, stopped transmitting data at 8:50am, according to the Flood Forecasting Division of the Centre of Hydrology and Water Resources Research in Nepal.
The department said it was alerted to a major flood shortly after and sent more than 600,000 text messages warning local residents by 9:16am.
Moment of impact
Waves of up to 30 metres high swept through riverside villages, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving them buried under mud. Videos posted on social media showed a bridge along the Trishuli river in Nepal’s Nuwakot district collapsing under the surging tide. The municipality of the neighbouring Rasuwa reported “significant damage” shortly after 10am local time.
Footage from a border crossing between Nepal and Chinese-controlled Tibet showed a massive wave crashing through buildings as people fled for their lives. Chinese state media said the impact was at around 10:30am and said there were “major casualties and missing persons”.
Survivors described losing family members and miraculous escapes.
Keshav Prasad Baral, 68, said his wife was swept away into the Trishuli river. “As [the water] got closer, it kept rising higher and higher,” he told ABC News. “When I saw it enter our home, I tried to grab my wife’s hand and take her to the terrace. But she was swept away by the mud.”
Nepali labourer Bibek Kumal said he was digging a pit downstream from Rasuwa when the disaster struck. “I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it was an earthquake,” he told Reuters from his bed at Kathmandu’s National Trauma Centre, where he was receiving treatment.
The torrent swept him into the branches of a mango tree “Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death,” he said.
The first rescue helicopters were airborne by 11am to retrieve survivors in the village of Timure, Rasuwa, but turned back with no place to land. Pilot Subash Khadka told the Kathmandu Post: “It looked as though a river that had been frozen suddenly burst its banks. The entire village of Timure was out of sight.”
Shortly after, Nepal’s Prime Minister, Balendra Shah, called a crisis meeting of the security cabinet to plan a large-scale response to the disaster as the first reports of casualties emerged.
A member of the Nepalese security forces and his sniffer dog search for survivors (Photo: Prakash Mathema/AFP)Rescue operation
Nepal mobilised 15 helicopters and hundreds of emergency workers in the hours after the flood hit, while sending appeals to neighbouring China and India, which said they would support the relief operation. Photos from the disaster zone showed police carrying victims to safety using any equipment available, including tractors and bulldozers.
Initial estimates for casualties and missing people rose steadily in the immediate aftermath, including a large proportion of foreign nationals in a popular destination for tourism.
Local authorities announced the first 12 people to be rescued shortly after 1pm, which rose to 114.
Dozens of the wounded were evacuated to nearby hospitals. But officials warned that emergency workers were hampered by difficult and dangerous conditions. Footage showed rescuers wading through deep mud to reach survivors.
The Nepali government announced large-scale infrastructure damage, including roads, communication networks, and power stations, with several bridges washed away. Survivors said they were unable to reach or contact family members in the affected areas.
Rescue personnel transport stranded residents using a bulldozer (Photo: Prakash Mathema/AFP)The recovery
The search operation slowed as darkness fell before ramping up again on Thursday morning as floodwaters receded and water levels dropped. Helicopters scanned the riverbanks and dropped emergency supplies for thousands of residents cut off from escape routes.
As the death toll rose, local authorities warned to expect more bad news. “This will go up, as we have resumed the search and more bodies are expected to be recovered,” police spokesperson Abi Narayan said.
Countries around the world have begun sending assistance, with Andy Burnham saying the UK has offered to send emergency responders to Nepal along with £5m in aid.
Nepal’s home minister Sudhan Gurung said the focus was on finding survivors. Rescue teams found 100 Indian tourists, mostly pilgrims, and 25 Chinese workers in the region around Trishuli. More than 650 foreigners are still unaccounted for, while Nepali authorities have yet to determine the number of locals missing.
Twelve of the missing Britons were travelling with one tour company, Alpine Eco Trek – the youngest being a 13-year-old girl and the oldest aged 65. Nine of the missing British citizens were travelling with Nepalese tour operator the Trekkers’ Society – four of them male and aged 14 to 65 and five women aged 40 to 53.
Sunil Sharma, a Nepali tourism board spokesman, said that Americans, Australians and Canadians were also among the missing.
A building is seen covered in heavy mud following flash floods on Wednesday in Trishuli, Nepal (Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty)Another wave
Authorities in China have now identified the risk of another wave from a dammed lake in Gyirong, upstream from the flooded border crossing, with more rain forecast, according to state-owned broadcaster CCTV.
The dammed lake was already overflowing on Thursday morning, CCTV reported, citing the Chinese water resources ministry.
Three million cubic metres of water — roughly 1,200 Olympic-size swimming pools — is expected to enter the lake over the next three days, with peak flow expected around Tuesday, creating a high risk of a breach. Last July, the rapid drainage of a lake on Tibet’s Purepa glacier led to deadly flooding in Nepal.
The latest disaster is part of a pattern of floods and landslides caused by glacier collapses. The same region of Nepal was hit by deadly flooding last year after a glacial lake in Tibet overflowed.
In 2021, a chunk of Himalayan ice sheared off a glacier in northern India, creating a cascade of debris and water that killed 200 people. Switzerland and Italy have also experienced floods and landslides caused by glacier collapses in recent years.
Dr Simon Cook, a glacier expert with the University of Dundee, told the BBC: “The logic is that with a warming planet, you will see shrinking glaciers, lots of snowmelt. The permafrost [centuries-old frozen soil] that is partially holding some mountainsides together is warming and thawing and degrading.
“So you are going to get more landslides, debris flows, glacial meltwater, lake outbursts, glacier collapses, because climate warming ultimately destabilises these high mountain environments.”
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