Nepal and Tibet, over a thousand dead in the Bhote Koshi flood and nearly four thousand missing-person reports
The Nepalese authority's bulletin at 9am on September 1 counts 987 recovered bodies; with the 16 deaths reported in Tibet, the overall toll exceeds one thousand for the first time. Only 4% of the bodies have been identified.
The Rasuwagadhi border crossing, several bridges, some hydroelectric plants and various sections of the only road link between Kathmandu and the Tibetan side were destroyed on August 26: they were swept away by the flood wave that came down without warning along the narrow valley of the Bhote Koshi, on the Nepal-Tibet border. Seven days later, the death count crossed a symbolic threshold and left open an accounting problem worth explaining before the figures.
The bulletin at 9am on September 1 from the Nepalese disaster risk reduction authority, the NDRRMA, counted 987 bodies recovered in Nepal, against 939 the previous evening: forty-eight in one night. The figure is reported by the bulletin cited by Mappr and by the bulletins collected by Al Jazeera. Adding the 16 deaths reported in Tibet, the overall toll on both sides exceeded one thousand for the first time.
Three numbers that do not measure the same thing
| Measure | Value | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|
| Bodies recovered in Nepal | 987 | Bodies physically found as of the 9am bulletin on September 1 |
| Missing persons reported in Nepal | 3,916 | Reports filed, not confirmed deaths |
| Missing persons reported in Tibet | 546 | Count from the Chinese side |
The distinction is not pedantry. Nepalese authorities have explicitly stated that the missing-persons list records reports filed, not confirmed deaths: within that number there may be people later found alive, duplicate reports, people unreachable due to disrupted communications. Treating 3,916 as victims would be a misreading; treating it as a meaningless number would be equally wrong, because in a narrow valley swept by a flood most reports are not resolved by finding someone alive.
Among the missing persons reported in Nepal are 583 foreign nationals from 38 countries: this measures how much the Bhote Koshi gorge was, on August 26, an international transit corridor as well as an inhabited valley.
The identification problem
According to Nepal’s Ministry of Health, cited by the record collecting NDRRMA, ministerial and Chinese television data, only 4% of the roughly 900 bodies found had been identified. It is the harshest figure in the toll: it means that, for nearly all the families who filed a report, the recovery of a body does not yet provide an answer.
Identification is also the hinge between the two counts. As long as it remains at 4%, the recovered bodies and the missing-persons list remain two sets that cannot be subtracted one from the other: the number of people still to be found cannot be deduced by taking a difference.
Why the numbers change within a few hours
Bulletins are updated several times a day and figures published at different times are not comparable as if they were snapshots of the same hour. The jump from 939 to 987 between the evening of August 31 and 9am on September 1 shows this. For this reason, in this story, every figure must be read together with the time of the bulletin containing it: that is why we indicate the time alongside the number.
What we do not know
We do not know the confirmed hydrological cause of the flood. We do not know how many people remain trapped or unreachable in the valley, nor the state of passability of the road to Tibet. No breakdown of the 3,916 missing persons by location is available, nor an update on identification beyond the 4% indicated by Nepal’s Ministry of Health. The next verifiable element is the NDRRMA’s next bulletin and its breakdown between recoveries and identifications.
← Archive · Front page · Past editorials · Report an error · Original article (in Italian)