Nepali officials say they have reached one of roughly 85 missing U.S. nationals nearly a week after a catastrophic glacier collapse triggered flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border, but thousands remain unaccounted for.
Government officials in Kathmandu confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that Nepali agencies made contact with one American whose identity, location, and condition have not been disclosed. The confirmation came as the broader death toll climbed past 1,050 in Nepal alone, with more than 4,600 people, locals and foreigners alike, still believed missing across the disaster zone.
A Nepal Tourism Board document compiled Monday evening listed five foreign nationals among the missing with whom rescuers were "in contact": one American, three Spanish nationals, and one Belgian. The same document put the total number of rescued foreign nationals at 315. Beyond those five, the vast majority of missing foreigners, and the roughly 600 Nepali hydroelectric workers believed trapped inside damaged power projects, have not been heard from.
The disaster began almost a week ago when a mountainside and glacier collapsed high in the Himalayas, setting off avalanches on both sides of the Nepal-Tibet border. Those avalanches fed flash floods that roared through river valleys popular with trekkers and dotted with hydroelectric installations.
Pattabiraman Venkatesan, a San Francisco Bay Area resident traveling with his partner Anjana Raja on a pilgrimage to Tibet, was on a tour bus when the floodwaters hit. He described the scene to CBS News on Friday:
"It's like 60, 70 feet, it looked like a tsunami, but dark black. I could see this monster thing coming down. At that point I didn't know if it was water. I thought it was fire, forest fire, honestly."
Venkatesan fled the bus and scrambled for higher ground. He and other survivors spent the night in a goat shed on a mountaintop before being airlifted to safety the following day. He and Raja are the only two Americans known to have been rescued from the disaster zone so far.
The flash floods along the Nepal-China border struck a region that draws hikers and pilgrims from more than thirty countries, compounding the search effort with language barriers and shattered infrastructure.
Nepal's Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told CBS News on Tuesday that authorities believe many of the missing foreigners may have been hiking when the disaster struck, leaving them cut off from phone and radio contact but possibly alive.
"This is one of the most popular trekking regions in Nepal, where a lot of tourists go. We're hoping that that's partly a communication challenge that we're experiencing. We're hoping that the numbers [of missing] would be significantly less."
That hope has not yet been tested by evidence. Rescue teams are still working to clear mud-blocked tunnels, and the sheer scale of the destruction, swollen rivers, collapsed roads, buried infrastructure, has slowed every phase of the response. On the Tibet side of the border, Chinese authorities confirmed 16 dead and more than 550 missing.
The combined toll makes this one of the deadliest natural disasters in the Himalayan region in years. As the death toll climbed past 900 earlier in the crisis, the missing count was already surging beyond 4,200, and it has only grown since.
Among the most urgent concerns is the fate of approximately 600 Nepali workers employed at hydroelectric power plants scattered through the flood zone. Nepal's prime minister stated that the workers are believed trapped inside several projects in the disaster area. Search and rescue teams have focused on clearing mud-packed tunnels to reach them, but progress has been slow.
The Trishuli Hydropower Plant, situated on the banks of the Trishuli River, sustained visible damage. Photos from August 30 showed a wrecked tunnel along the swollen riverbank. By September 1, residents in the nearby Trishuli Center area of Nuwakot district were scouting through debris for anything salvageable.
Rohit Tamang, a 22-year-old who has lived near the Trishuli River his entire life, watched the waters surge last Wednesday. No one in the region can remember the sacred river ever swelling higher. Tamang told CBS News he refuses to leave his home "because my childhood memories are here."
That kind of stubbornness is common in disaster zones where people have nowhere else to go and no government safety net waiting for them. The death toll passing 1,000 has not changed the calculus for residents who have already lost everything except the ground they are standing on.
Raja and Venkatesan remain the only U.S. nationals confirmed rescued. The gap between two confirmed safe and 85 still missing is stark, and the lack of detail about the one American recently contacted only underscores how little visibility anyone has into the disaster zone.
CBS News has not yet confirmed the identity or condition of the contacted American. Nepali officials have not said how the contact was made, whether by satellite phone, radio, or a rescue team reaching the person on foot. The disappearance of a Texas couple in the same disaster has drawn national attention to the plight of American families waiting for word.
Foreign Minister Khanal's suggestion that the high missing count reflects a communications breakdown rather than mass casualties may prove correct. But "hoping" is not a rescue plan, and almost a week into this disaster, hope is the primary thing officials have offered the families of 85 Americans who have not been heard from.
Rescue teams clearing tunnels by hand. A single confirmed contact out of 85. A government that frames the crisis partly as a phone-signal problem. And survivors like Venkatesan, who outran a 70-foot wall of black water and spent the night in a goat shed, left to wonder how many others were not so lucky.
When Americans go missing abroad, their families deserve more than optimistic press conferences. They deserve a government, theirs and the host country's, that treats every missing person like a life still worth finding. The stories of individual survival in this disaster are remarkable precisely because they are so rare.
Eighty-five families are still waiting by the phone. A week in, that number should be shrinking a lot faster than one at a time.
