Nepal, flood death toll rises to 1,287: two engineers pulled out alive after nine days

This newspaper has been following for days the flash flood on the border between Nepal and Tibet, and today’s figure is an increase, not a correction: according to the Nepalese National Disaster Management Authority, the toll has risen to 1,287 dead and 4,216 missing as of September 3, up from 1,114 dead and 3,916 missing reported the previous day. The numbers are reported by ABC News, based on data from the Nepalese authority relayed by the Associated Press, and by correspondents from CNN, who are in contact with Nepalese and Chinese authorities.

The new development accompanying the count runs in the opposite direction: two engineers were pulled out alive on Friday from a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project, after nine days. We are not publishing their names, though wire services have released them: they are private individuals, and this newspaper’s rule applies even when the news is good.

The scale of the rescue operations

The figures for the operations give a sense of the scale of the event: nearly 12,000 people rescued, about 21,500 security personnel mobilized, over 5,000 injured treated. The trigger, according to CNN’s account, was the collapse of a glacier.

On the Chinese side, the two sources do not match, and we report that rather than choosing the more convenient number. ABC News reports that Chinese state media put the toll at 16 dead and 546 missing in Tibet; CNN, in its Wednesday update, puts the figure at 21 dead in China. The two figures have different dates and geographic scope and should not be added together or conflated.

The hydropower construction sites

A significant portion of the missing belong to a specific category: workers at the hydropower projects built along the rivers that later flooded. According to the Nepalese National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), cited by Al Jazeera, as of August 31 there were 933 workers employed at these sites reported missing. The Independent Power Producers’ Association of Nepal puts the figure at at least 93 missing at the Rasuwagadhi project alone.

This is the fact that explains why the recovery of the two engineers from the Upper Trishuli 3A tunnel drew such attention: the tunnels under construction have been, in this disaster, among the places hardest to escape from.

Burials outside Bharatpur

In a wooded area on the outskirts of the city of Bharatpur, authorities have buried hundreds of bodies unclaimed by families in a mass grave. The police officer in charge of the site told CNN correspondents that over 200 bodies had been buried there in a single day. This is not a statistic: it is how an emergency system manages the gap between recovered bodies and possible identifications.

Another figure, from the Chinese side, shows how international the list of people involved is: in Tibet, 261 foreign nationals from 23 countries were reported unaccounted for, according to Chinese authorities.

What we don’t know

We don’t know how many of the 4,216 missing in Nepal are linked to the hydropower construction sites and how many to the resident population: the two counts have different dates (September 3 for the first, August 31 for the second) and come from two distinct authorities. We don’t know the criteria by which a person moves from the missing column to the victims column, nor the timeframe involved. We don’t know the status of the searches in the tunnels that remain flooded.

When the next bulletins revise these figures, this newspaper will state the direction of the change: today it is an increase of 173 confirmed deaths and 300 missing in twenty-four hours.