Emergency teams have recovered at least 490 bodies from the flood that tore down the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday, and workers remain trapped inside hydropower tunnels in Nepal’s Trishuli valley (Express Tribune/AFP, ABC News).
The toll has almost tripled since Thursday morning, when Nepal Police put it at 162 in a 5am bulletin — the figure The Pakistan Daily carried yesterday. It reached 389 by Thursday evening and 469 by Friday morning, and has kept climbing through Friday as bodies are recovered far downstream.
How the number breaks down
Nepal Police put the number of bodies recovered in Nepal at 489 on Friday, of which 393 have not been identified (OnlineKhabar). The count climbed through the day: 469 on Friday morning, 475 by 11:22am (Kathmandu Post), 477 in the afternoon (ABC News), then 489. Chinese authorities have confirmed three dead on the Tibetan side, in Gyirong county, and have not revised that number since. Those two official counts are what produce the combined total of about 492; the figure is not a single agency’s tally, and it has been rising by the hour. Wire copy filed earlier on Friday, including AFP’s and Reuters’, still had the pairing at 469 plus three (Express Tribune, Geo News/Reuters, Dawn — the last two carrying the same Reuters wire).
Much of the jump came from downstream. Ganesh Aryal, administrator of Chitwan district — about 100km out on the plains from the worst-hit Trishuli area — told Reuters his district had recovered 103 bodies from the river system. Nepal Police’s own district bulletin, issued later, put Chitwan’s count at 178, the highest of any district and by itself more than a third of the national toll. Local hospitals could not hold the dead and tents were being pitched so families could claim them.
The lake has breached
A barrier lake formed by the floodwaters near the Chhochen Khola-Purepu Tsangpo confluence, close to the Chinese border, has breached, and Nepal was preparing aerial reconnaissance over Rasuwa on Friday to assess what came down (Kathmandu Post). The lake had been the central fear of the past two days: Nepali and Chinese authorities had both warned that a breach could send a second surge down the same valley. What that means for the search downstream, and for the people still in the tunnel, had not been established by Friday afternoon.
More than 1,500 missing
Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority puts the number out of contact in Nepal at 977, of whom 517 are foreign nationals (ABC News). Chinese state broadcaster CCTV gave the missing in Gyirong county as 558, including 260 foreign nationals. Those two official counts add to 1,535, which is consistent with the “more than 1,500” figure AP was using on Friday (AP).
The wire figures lag the Nepali authority’s. AFP’s Friday copy put Nepal’s missing at 910, including the same 517 foreign tourists, and the cross-border total at “more than 1,400” — 910 plus 558 is 1,468, so AFP’s own numbers reconcile, but against a smaller Nepal count than NDRRMA now publishes. Reuters wrote of “almost 1,000” missing and worded it as covering Nepal and Tibet together, which cannot be right given CCTV’s 558 for Gyirong alone; the number tracks NDRRMA’s Nepal-only 977. The counts are moving hour to hour and no single authority has published a consolidated cross-border list.
Indians are the largest group of missing foreigners, AFP reports. The United States says 90 of its citizens are out of contact. Many were Hindu pilgrims heading for Mount Kailash on the Chinese side, or trekkers on the Kathmandu-Lhasa route.
The tunnel
Nepal Army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet told AFP that 350 workers and residents have been brought to safety from the site, and that efforts continue to reach more than 100 still trapped in the same area.
That figure of more than 100 covers tunnels across all the flood-hit hydropower projects, not the Trishuli 3A tunnel alone — it is the count issued by Nepal’s Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation. The Nepal Electricity Authority’s acting managing director, Dirgahyu Kumar Shrestha, put the number out of contact at the Upper Trishuli 3A powerhouse at 40 to 45, with more than 100 at Rasuwagadhi, 15 to 20 at Chilime and 20 to 25 at Upper Trishuli 3B. The Kathmandu Post reported 35 still inside the 3A tunnel.
They have not been reached. “Two helicopters have been dispatched but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” Basnet said. As of Friday afternoon a team sent to find the tunnel’s entry and exit points had still not located them, with everything buried under mud (ABC News). Nepal’s disaster authority says 3,253 people have been rescued from the flood zone in total.
What caused it, and what comes next
The US Geological Survey attributes the disaster to a glacier collapse that sent a vast flow of ice, rock, mud and debris down Himalayan river systems on Wednesday morning. It is Nepal’s deadliest disaster since the 2015 earthquake.
The debris is now the second danger. Nepal’s disaster management authority warns that a lake dammed by rubble on the Bhotekoshi river is rising and could burst. China says about three million cubic metres of water will drain into an already dammed lake over three days, with peak flow expected around 1 September and a high risk of a breach.
China has suspended its rescue operation at Gyirong and pulled teams back one kilometre after the barrier lake began overflowing, CCTV said. Nepali crews are still digging.
Correction, 29 August 2026: this story originally said about 100 workers were trapped in the tunnel at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project, and carried that figure in its headline. That number is Nepal’s Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation’s count of people trapped inside tunnels across all the flood-hit projects, not at 3A. AFP’s wording — “more than a hundred trapped in the same area” — was rendered too specifically. The Nepal Electricity Authority puts the number out of contact at Upper Trishuli 3A at 40 to 45. The headline and text have been corrected.
