The death toll from last week's catastrophic flash floods in central Nepal has climbed to 768, with more than 2,500 people still unaccounted for nearly a week after the disaster, Nepali authorities said on Sunday.
The floods were triggered on Wednesday morning when a massive chunk of glacier sheared off near the Nepal-Tibet border and plunged roughly 7,000 feet into the valley below, sending a wall of water, mud, ice and debris hurtling downstream through the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river corridors.
The surge, which reached heights of nearly 30 feet in places, wiped out towns and villages, destroyed roads and bridges, and swept away hydropower infrastructure across eight districts in central Nepal.
Chitwan district, which borders India, has recorded the highest number of casualties, with authorities there struggling to cope with the scale of recoveries.
Overwhelmed hospital mortuaries and decomposing remains have forced officials to begin burying unidentified and unclaimed bodies after collecting DNA samples and assigning identification numbers, so that families can request exhumation once a match is confirmed at a later date.
The missing include a large number of foreign nationals caught in the disaster while travelling through the border region, among them pilgrims returning from the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra.
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Earlier tallies had put foreigners unaccounted for in the hundreds, drawn from more than twenty countries, including India, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and several European nations.
Search operations for foreign nationals have also extended to the Tibetan side of the border, where China has been conducting a parallel search and verification exercise.
Rescue efforts have continued to be hampered by poor weather, blocked terrain and the sheer distance debris and bodies have travelled downstream, complicating identification.
Nepali security forces, backed by international assistance including from India and China, have focused in particular on hydropower tunnel sites in Rasuwa district, where workers remained trapped days after the flood struck, even as broader search-and-rescue and relief operations continued across the affected districts.
The disaster, one of the deadliest flood-related tragedies in Nepal's recent history, has also prompted requests for foreign expertise in forensic identification and infrastructure repair, including modular bridging equipment to restore transport links severed by the floods.
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