Rescuers continue the search on Saturday August 29 to find survivors after the deadly flood which hit a region of the Himalayas on Wednesday, on the border between Nepal and the Chinese province of Tibet. According to official reports which are still very provisional, a total of 682 bodies – 675 on the Nepalese side, 7 on the Chinese territory of Tibet – were exhumed from the thick layer of mud and the rubble of buildings, roads, bridges and construction sites swept away by the wave.
A small glimmer of hope on Saturday evening: the Nepalese army managed to insert an air pipe into a tunnel where workers working on hydroelectric dam sites, trapped underground, could still be alive.
“We have already started feeding air through this small opening, and now we will start the excavation work and send the rescue team inside,” Nepali Interior Minister Sudan Gurung said.
According to the Nepalese government, more than a hundred workers could still be alive in the tunnels, with rescue efforts focusing on the Trishuli 3A and 3B sites.
Experts and scientists attribute the disaster to the collapse of a huge glacier which transformed, in an instant, a peaceful river into a raging river. Nepalese authorities and the head of the UN Climate Change invoked climate change on Saturday.
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“Global warming caused by humanity’s burning of colossal quantities of coal, oil and gas makes tragedies like this, and so many others around the world, much more likely, frequent and serious,” warned Simon Stiell, head of UN Climate, in a press release.
“Nepal emits less than 0.01% of greenhouse gases, but we, the people of Nepal, are among the main victims of climate change,” Shisir Khanal, the country’s foreign minister, separately noted.
Missing tourists and pilgrims
In the affected regions, the authorities are struggling to find the trace of some 3,000 people – 2,426 in Nepal and 556 on the Chinese side – of whom they have had no news since Wednesday.
“All the houses near the river have been swept away. There is nothing left,” Buddhi Ram Dangol, a Nepalese from the buried valley, told AFP.
The rescue work is slow, difficult, exhausting, described a Nepalese civil security rescuer, Kawan Koirala.
“People absolutely want to find their loved ones, dead or alive, but we can’t do it (…) Look at all this mud,” he told AFP, exhausted after eighteen hours of non-stop work. “It’s very disturbing for me too. It’s the first time I’ve seen this.”
Among the missing are hundreds of tourists, pilgrims going to the sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet and foreign workers employed on the construction sites of dams under construction in the region, as well as an ever-increasing number of residents of devastated villages.
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Cover image: © France 24
The Isha Foundation, led by Hindu spiritual leader Sadhguru, announced on Instagram on Saturday that 80 of its members were on pilgrimage to the Gyirong region, the main area affected by the tragedy, which was “totally devastated”.
“At the moment, there seems to be no hope of survivors,” Isha continued. Relatives of the missing continued to flock to the Nepalese relief campaign headquarters in Bidur on Saturday in search of information. But their hope is dwindling.
“It’s already been more than three days,” Rishi Shrestha told AFP, without news since Wednesday of his cousin who was supposed to go to China. “So there’s a 99% chance that he’s no longer alive.”
A “several billion dollar” reconstruction
Even if it is still too early for a precise assessment, the Nepalese Minister of Foreign Affairs has already estimated the cost of reconstruction at “several billion dollars”, and appeals for “the support of the international community”.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) estimated the number of victims on Friday at 93,000, citing “enormous trauma”.
In China, thousands of rescuers continue to battle to make their way to the heart of the devastated area, the Gyirong border post at an altitude of 1,830 m. According to the New China agency, a little more than 500 of them are now hard at work there.
Public television CCTV broadcast images of helmeted firefighters crossing a torrent on inflatable boats or hoisted using a powerful drone. “The biggest difficulty is ensuring the safety of our military,” said one officer, Jiang Wanqiang.
The reservoir no longer threatens to give way
The large reservoir of water which formed upstream of the border post and threatened to suddenly give way, now presents “normal natural flow” and the obstruction which held it back is “almost completely evacuated”, the Xinhua news agency said on Saturday evening, citing the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources.
The surface of the lake, located near the confluence of the Chhochen Khola and Purepu Tsangpo rivers, decreased by 21,000 square meters between Thursday and Saturday, state television CCTV said, a sign that the volume of water is decreasing.
With AFP
