Nepal Flood Toll Passes 750 as Girl Is Pulled Alive From the Rubble
KATHMANDU / NUWAKOT — At around six in the evening on 28 August, at an altitude of 2,200 metres near the border settlement of Timure, men from Nepal's Armed Police Force lifted a small girl out of a collapsed building and carried her into the light. She had been under the wreckage for roughly two days. The force released video of the rescue, and for a few hours it was the one piece of footage from this disaster that people could bear to watch twice.
It has been almost the only such moment. Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said on Sunday that the number of confirmed dead from Wednesday's flash floods and landslides had risen to 752, with 2,502 people still unaccounted for — up from 2,498 the previous day. Neither figure is expected to hold.
The catastrophe arrived on the morning of 26 August, when a vast mass of water, ice and rock came down from the Tibetan side into the Lhende Khola and then the Bhote Koshi. There was almost no warning. The surge carried into the Trishuli, where the river rose by as much as nine metres in half an hour, and swept through Rasuwa district before tearing on into Nuwakot, Dhading and, eventually, the plains.
Roads went, bridges went, and the settlements along the valley floor were buried rather than flooded. Drone footage from Nuwakot has shown half a bridge left standing above a mud-caked valley, and villages where excavators are now digging through what used to be homes.
The response has been enormous. The disaster authority said on Sunday that close to 20,000 security personnel had been mobilised and that 8,730 people had been brought to safety. Helicopters have flown continuously in weather that has not always allowed it; some settlements remain reachable only by air.
The largest single concentration of the missing is not in a village but at construction sites. The Independent Power Producers' Association, Nepal, says 898 people working on eleven hydropower projects are out of contact. The Upper Trishuli-1 project alone accounts for 576 of them.
The most difficult site is a tunnel along the Trishuli, where the Nepali Army believes more than a hundred people may be trapped behind thick mud. Rescuers have been pumping air into the tunnel and are preparing to drill a manhole in the hope of getting teams inside. Around 361 hydropower workers have been rescued so far.
Families have gathered at the army's training centre in Trishuli, in Nuwakot, and turn their heads every time a helicopter comes down. Many have been there since Wednesday. Some have begun saying openly that the search has been too slow.
In Kathmandu, the walls of the main government hospital are papered with photographs of the missing, names and telephone numbers written underneath. Beside them, officials have posted images of unidentified bodies in the hope that someone will recognise a face. Gajendra Rawat, a security official at the hospital help desk, said around 1,600 missing-person reports had been registered since Wednesday. "People are coming from all parts of Nepal," he said.
Among those waiting was Nelza Moktan, searching for a cousin who worked as a driver in Rasuwa. "I feel hopeless. It has already been four days," she said.
The missing include a great many young men who had taken jobs in the valley's power projects. Sadikshya Pandey learned that her cousin, a mechanical engineer at Upper Trishuli-1 3A, was unaccounted for while she was on a break at work. "On my break I was scrolling through my phone and saw devastating news," she told CNN. Her family last reached his phone at around ten that morning. By eleven it was switched off. They are still hoping.
Readers should treat every figure in this story as provisional. Communications across the whole belt were destroyed, and "missing" here means out of contact rather than presumed dead. Thousands of those counted are almost certainly alive in places a phone signal cannot reach.
At the same time, the grimmer accounting has begun. Nepal's health ministry said the burial of severely damaged and unidentifiable remains started on Saturday in Chitwan and Nawalparasi districts, and will be extended to other affected areas. That process, necessary as it is, means some families may never receive a confirmation.
Early on Sunday, Nepal's disaster authority reported that the flow of the Bhote Koshi in Rasuwa had risen again — audibly so, according to the district administration — and asked residents of Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading to stay alert. A text alert went to people in the area at about 4:30 a.m. It advised vigilance but stopped short of ordering an evacuation.
On the Chinese side, the picture is similarly unsettled. A monitoring drone detected a fresh landslide on a slope roughly 2.8 kilometres downstream of the existing barrier lake on the Purepu Tsangpo river, according to China's Ministry of Emergency Management. The slide has blocked the river again and formed a second barrier lake, and rescue personnel near Gyirong Port were evacuated. China's rescue operation there had already been suspended on Friday over the risk of a renewed flood.
International assistance is arriving. The United States announced on Saturday that it was providing more than $3.6 million in humanitarian aid to Nepal, up from an initial $500,000, including up to three months of emergency food support for as many as 10,000 flood-affected households.
A pattern, not an accident
This is the second time in fourteen months that the Bhote Koshi has done this. In July 2025, a supraglacial lake in Tibet drained into the same river, killing nine people and destroying the Miterepul bridge linking Nepal and China. That flood also knocked out hydropower capacity in Rasuwa — including the same Rasuwagadhi, Trishuli 3A and Devighat plants now damaged again.
Scientists studying this week's event believe the trigger was an ice avalanche or a glacial lake bursting — the category known as a glacial lake outburst flood. What alarms them is that it came without the heavy rainfall that early-warning systems are built to detect, and that it came from a lake nobody was monitoring.
For now, in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, none of that is the immediate concern. The concern is the helicopters, and the lists on the wall, and the one small piece of footage in which somebody's daughter is carried out alive.
