Nepal's army pulled four bodies from a flooded hydropower tunnel this week, more than three weeks after a flash flood killed over 1,400 people and left thousands unaccounted for, with families accusing the government of abandoning them.
Soldiers recovered the remains from the Chilime Hydropower plant on the Trishuli River, one of 13 hydropower facilities damaged when catastrophic flooding tore through the Nepal-China border region on Aug. 26. Nepal's disaster management agency said five more bodies had been located at a separate site, and that equipment was being dispatched to retrieve them. The grim recoveries mark the latest chapter in a disaster that has stretched into its fourth week with no end in sight, the Associated Press reported.
Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority puts the toll at 1,403 bodies recovered so far. Another 6,150 people are still missing. The government estimates reconstruction will cost roughly $4.78 billion, a staggering sum for a country whose entire annual budget is a fraction of that figure.
For the relatives of the missing, the numbers are not abstract. Usha Khatri's husband, Indra Bahadur, was working as a cook with a group of pilgrims near the Nepal-China border when the floodwaters hit. He has not been heard from since.
Khatri has spent weeks traveling from town to town along the river, checking wherever bodies have washed ashore. She told reporters she has received no help from officials:
"The government has not done much for us. They have not met us or given any information or any assurances. I am by myself searching for my husband."
Her account captures a pattern that has defined the disaster response. Families want the government to formally declare the missing dead so they can obtain death certificates, documents they need to settle legal matters, perform religious rites, and begin to grieve. Whether the government has acted on those demands remains unclear.
At Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, the lobby walls are covered with photos of hundreds of missing people. Relatives crowd the hospital seeking any scrap of news about loved ones. The scene has become a grim fixture of Nepal's capital, weeks after floodwaters first swallowed entire work sites along the Trishuli River.
Rescue teams have struggled with conditions inside the hydropower tunnels from the start. Thick mud, debris, and damaged infrastructure have blocked access to areas where workers were swept underground. The government has called finding those workers a priority, but progress has been painfully slow.
Experts warned early on that time was the enemy. Jennifer Horney, a disaster epidemiologist at the University of Delaware, told the New York Post that the first 72 hours were critical for anyone trapped underground.
"There just really wouldn't be a way to go much further than the three days without safe, drinkable water."
Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz, echoed that assessment, saying it was "a race for time" because trapped workers needed food and water. Oxygen was reportedly delivered to some tunnel locations in the days after the flood, but suffocation concerns grew as the first week wore on.
There were moments of hope. On Sept. 4, nine days after the flood, rescuers pulled two Nepali workers out alive. A day later, a Chinese worker was extracted from a separate area. Those rescues drew comparisons to a 2023 Himalayan tunnel collapse in which 41 workers survived 17 days underground.
But as the calendar has turned past three weeks, the odds of finding anyone else alive have dropped to near zero. The operation has shifted from rescue to recovery, and even recovery moves at a crawl when tunnels are packed with mud and the surrounding infrastructure is wrecked.
The scale of this disaster dwarfs anything Nepal has faced in recent memory from flooding alone. Thirteen hydropower plants, critical pieces of Nepal's energy grid, were damaged or destroyed. The government's $4.78 billion reconstruction estimate covers infrastructure, but it does not account for the economic toll on families who lost breadwinners and have no death certificates to unlock insurance, pensions, or property transfers.
Among the missing are workers from multiple countries. The flood zone near the Nepal-China border drew pilgrims, construction crews, and hydropower laborers from across the region. Even American citizens were caught in the disaster's path, underscoring how far the destruction reached.
One of the survivors, Sanjay Sah, eventually returned home after spending nine days trapped underground. His case became a symbol of resilience, but also a reminder of how many others never walked out.
The government says finding trapped hydropower workers remains a priority. Families like Usha Khatri's say the government's words have not matched its actions. Three weeks in, with 6,150 people still unaccounted for, the gap between official statements and on-the-ground reality is wide enough to swallow any remaining trust.
Nepal's disaster management authority has tracked recovery efforts since the early days of the flood, yet families report they have received neither information nor assurances. The government has not publicly addressed whether it will grant the death declarations families need. Every day without that paperwork is another day widows cannot bury their dead according to custom, cannot access whatever meager benefits may exist, and cannot begin to rebuild.
Open questions remain. How many workers were inside the 13 damaged hydropower plants when the water hit? Has the equipment dispatched for the five newly located bodies arrived? And why, after more than three weeks, are families still wandering riverbanks alone?
When a government cannot account for more than six thousand of its own people and cannot even hand a widow a piece of paper, the failure is not logistical. It is moral.
