Nepal Flash Floods Kill 160, Leave Nearly 900 Missing — And the Numbers Are Still Rising

To be exact, the Bhote Koshi river, which is called the Lhende in Tibet, stopped being a river at 8:40 a.m. on August 26, 2026. It changed into something else. Within minutes, a huge wave of water, ice, rock, and sediment swept through the valley that is shared by Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts and China’s Gyirong County, destroying bridges, engulfing cars, and pulling whole towns into the flow. At least 160 people were known to be dead by the time it got dark. Almost 900 more were not there.

It was hard to deal with the images that came up. A busy checkpoint on the land route to Mount Kailash was overrun in less than a minute, as seen on CCTV footage from the border crossing between Nepal and China. What was in the way of the mudslide was destroyed. A lot of people ran. Some made it.

The events that led to this are still being put together. China had an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.4 three minutes before Nepal was hit by floods. Scientists now think that the earthquake may have broken off a huge piece of glacier, which then fell into the Lhende River. Scientists have named what happened a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF). It may have been caused by a glacial collapse and a landslide. Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of California, said that the sheer amount of water seen in the video was hard to explain by a small earthquake alone. Since it was monsoon season, the ground had been wet for weeks. The mountain had been ready.

This area has seen glacial lake outburst floods before, so it’s important to take a moment to think about that word. The same thing killed over 100 people in Sikkim in 2023. In the same way, the Uttarakhand flood of 2021 killed more than 200 people. This is happening more often in the Himalayas as temperatures rise, glaciers melt faster, and temporary lakes filled with meltwater form behind natural dams that are becoming less stable. This week, terrible things happened on the border between Nepal and Tibet. In a painful way, it was also expected.

People from at least 12 different countries are among the missing. Of those people, 47 were Americans, 133 were Indian pilgrims, 53 were Ukrainians, 90 were Italians, 9 were South Koreans, and dozens were Nepalis traveling for Janai Purnima, a festival that was supposed to happen later this week. A lot of them were on organized pilgrimages to Mount Kailash, the pyramid-shaped Tibetan peak that Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bonpo followers all worship. A well-known Indian spiritual leader said that 77 people from his group are still missing. The pilgrims are going from Kathmandu to Tibet through the mountains, which means they will be going right through the flood zone.

Nepalese restaurant owner Pema Gurung was waiting for news from friends in Syapru Beshy and Timure, two trading towns in Rasuwa that were buried by floodwaters. She was at the Manaslu Café in Queens, New York. There were no phone lines left. There was no internet. The power was gone. “I’m numb, totally numb,” he told the reporters. “My mind is broken.” This scene is happening right now in hundreds of living rooms on several continents: people are staring at phones that aren’t ringing while they wait for news that might not come.

Throughout the nite, rescue efforts continued, with 11 ground teams sent by Nepal’s Prime Minister’s Office and helicopter crews trying to fly people to safety, though the floodwaters were still too high in many places for safe landings. About 200 people had been saved by Wednesday evening. People were still trapped in tunnels in the disaster zone. There were no roads left. There were at least 19 bridges and 40 kilometers of roads along the Bhote Koshi that had been washed away.

Nepal’s new prime minister, Balendra Shah, who took office in March after an anti-corruption movement led by young people overthrew the previous government, posted a message on Facebook to show his sympathy and say that the government would help with rescue, treatment, food, and shelter. Shah is 36 years old, used to be a rapper, and has no political experience. He is now in charge of a binational disaster with geopolitical undercurrents. It has been hard for him to get along with both India and China. Indian leaders moved quickly, though, sending 10 metric tons of humanitarian aid and medicines that people needed. Prime Minister Modi also offered to personally oversee the rescue efforts.

For its part, China said only three people had died as of Wednesday evening, but 265 people in Gyirong County are still missing. China’s government called together a lot of different agencies, gave out about $17 million in emergency aid, and President Xi Jinping told officials to focus on search operations first. Nepali researchers, on the other hand, have pointed out something that is harder to fix with money: Nepal and China don’t share real-time information about the conditions of glacial lakes in Tibet. That lack of information could have cost important warning time. Alerts that came earlier might have helped get people off the banks of the river before the water came in.

Before and after pictures of towns like Devighat and Tupche taken by Planet Labs are so stark that words can’t quite describe them. The rivers got brown and swollen. Bridges are just not there. Homes and roads have been turned into mud fields. It took weeks of work to rebuild something that was lost in seconds.

As rescue teams reach farther away, the number of deaths is likely to rise. Aside from the sadness, this disaster will also raise an important question about whether the Himalayan countries that share rivers and glaciers are working together enough on early warning systems. In some places, it was clear that the infrastructure wasn’t there. It’s a whole different question whether there is now political will to build it.