Fears of a second flood in Nepal. Three Italians still missing

Rescue operations in the border area between Nepal and Tibet have been suspended several times due to the risk of a second flood. The lake that formed behind the barrier of mud and debris left by Wednesday’s landslide has begun to overflow, as announced by the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV: Chinese rescue teams have been ordered to withdraw one kilometre from the site and await further instructions. On the Nepalese side, the army suspended search operations for an hour and a half whilst the river level rose again. Witnesses told Reuters that residents of Rasuwa were running up the hillsides.

This is the main concern at this stage of the emergency. The glacier collapse and the rock avalanche on Wednesday morning, which caused the surge of water and mud that destroyed villages, roads and bridges along the courses of the Lhende, the Bhote Koshi and the Trishuli, have also left two dammed lakes in the valley – one on Nepalese territory and one on Chinese territory – which are continuing to fill.

The one on the Chinese side formed near the confluence of the Chhochen Khola and the Purepu Tsangpo, according to the Kathmandu Post. According to the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, on Friday morning it contained around two million cubic metres of water and had already partially overflowed; a further three million cubic metres could be added over the next three days, with the peak level expected on 1 September. If the dam were to fail all at once, the valley would be swept through a second time by the same wave that struck on Wednesday, passing over communities that have already been destroyed and with hundreds of rescue workers inside.

The Tibet Department of Natural Resources has announced that it has evacuated residents from several downstream villages. Xinhua reported that securing the dam is the top priority for the teams involved in the emergency response: China Aneng, the state-owned company responsible for operations of this kind, has dispatched 310 rescue workers and technicians to the site, along with 120 vehicles, and an advance team is using drones and 3D laser scanners to determine the composition of the debris plug, its size and the speed at which the water is flowing. The mudslide has come to a halt around two and a half kilometres from the Gyirong Pass, where the deposits are up to one and a half metres thick and are significantly slowing down vehicles.

This morning, the Nepalese police said they had recovered 469 bodies, about a hundred more than on Thursday evening: the confirmed death toll on the Chinese side remains at three. At least 466 people have been injured. More than a thousand are still missing, and the figure continues to fluctuate because the Nepalese and Chinese lists may be counting the same people twice: the authorities in Gyirong put the number at 558 on their side alone, of whom 260 are foreigners.

Among those missing are hundreds of tourists and pilgrims from more than thirty countries: 178 Indians, around 80 Americans, 35 Australians, 33 Britons and 25 Canadians. Many were returning from Mount Kailash in Tibet, a destination for Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimages. The Indian guru Jaggi Vasudev, known as Sadhguru, wrote on X that 77 pilgrims who had set off with his foundation were at the Gyirong immigration centre when the flood struck.

The Nepalese army has managed to rescue around 350 workers and residents who were trapped in a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli hydroelectric plant. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, around a hundred people were still trapped inside. At Tribhuvan University Hospital in Kathmandu, where many of the rescued are being taken, the walls are covered with lists of those admitted and photos of those still being searched for.

According to the Foreign Ministry, three Italians remain unaccounted for. One is Marco Ratto, a 50-year-old goldsmith from Rapallo, who was travelling from Nepal towards Tibet: the Chinese agency that was supposed to take charge of his group said it had lost contact with them at the border crossing. The other two are an Italian-Swiss couple who were travelling in the opposite direction. The Foreign Ministry explained that it had contacted around 130 Italian nationals reported to be in the area, and, on the instructions of Minister Antonio Tajani, had sent staff from the New Delhi embassy to Kathmandu to step up assistance.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched a $43 million emergency appeal on Friday, designed to cover relief efforts and the subsequent two years of reconstruction: according to its estimates, around 93,000 people may have been affected by the disaster. Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain said that entire villages had been wiped out and that needs would increase in the coming days. The problems of the isolation of the affected areas and the destruction of infrastructure remain, making it difficult both to assess the full extent of the disaster and to deliver aid.

In recent days, India had sent ten tonnes of emergency supplies; the United Nations had allocated two million dollars; Australia 3.6 million; and the United States 500,000 dollars. The European Union has activated the Copernicus satellite service to map the area.

The picture regarding the causes is now fairly clear: satellite images confirm that a section of the glacier broke away at an altitude of around 5,200 metres, with a mass of rock plummeting more than a thousand metres down to the valley floor. The United States Geological Survey has corrected its initial analysis, which had reported an earthquake of magnitude 4.4: the seismic signal, subsequently recalculated as magnitude 5.2, had been caused by the rockfall itself.

Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz, told Australian public radio that he had prepared a report for the Nepalese government a year ago following a similar incident – which had killed twenty people in the same area – and that he was currently preparing another one. This is the point that glaciologists have been emphasising for some time: in the Himalayas, incidents of this kind are becoming more frequent, and the communities and infrastructure downstream — border roads, customs posts, hydroelectric power stations — were built without taking this into account.