Namaste, diaspora family. This is the second week of the Bhotekoshi disaster, and the digest is still given over mostly to it. The count passed a thousand on Tuesday. By Thursday noon the national disaster authority had recorded 1,252 dead, and only 95 of those bodies had been identified and returned to a family. On Friday morning, nine days after the water came, soldiers dug through the last of the debris blocking a hydropower tunnel in Nuwakot and brought two men out alive. About 115 of their colleagues are still inside. This edition covers the search, the graves, a Parliament that turned on the government, a foreign minister who said “compensation” on Monday and stepped back from it on Friday, the first relief package for businesses, and the people carrying all of this: an 83-year-old priest in Rasuwa, a valley cut off for the second time in eleven years, and Nepalis from Leicester to Seoul who cancelled Teej and sent the money home instead. We have also let a small number of non-flood items back in as briefs, where they matter to readers abroad. Everything else waits. Where the Count Stands The figures are still moving, and different bodies are still counting differently. This is how the week ran: * Sunday 30 August, 3pm: 788 bodies recovered; 2,502 missing (NDRRMA, via The Tribune) * Monday 31 August: 903 dead; 4,247 unaccounted for (NDRRMA, via The Kathmandu Post) * Tuesday 1 September: 1,003 dead; 3,916 missing (ABC News) * Wednesday 2 September: 1,204 dead; 1,114 bodies recovered (The Tribune; the Prime Minister to Parliament) * Thursday 3 September, noon: 1,252 dead; 4,216 unaccounted for; 95 identified (NDRRMA, via The Kathmandu Post) * Friday 4 September: 1,259 dead (ANI, via The Tribune) The “missing” figure is the one to treat with most care. The Prime Minister told Parliament on Wednesday that 3,916 people were out of contact. The disaster authority’s wider count, which includes everyone reported unreachable by a relative, has gone above 5,000. Both are honest numbers describing different things. Chitwan, more than a hundred kilometres downstream, still holds the largest share of the dead: 355 by Thursday. On the Tibetan side, Chinese authorities report 21 dead and 541 missing, figures we cannot check (The Kathmandu Post). 🏔️ The Search Nine Days Underground At about 7:30 on the morning of 26 August, Kabir Maharjan rang his wife from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, where he had worked for seven years. An hour later the flood arrived. Down in the control room, Sanjay Sah, a 30-year-old mechanical foreman from Saptari, did what his job required. “I told everyone to run,” he said afterwards. “In doing that, my time was lost. In the end, I could not get out.” On Friday morning, after Nepali Army and Armed Police teams had dug through 50 to 60 metres of boulders and mud, both men walked out of the tunnel and were flown to Kathmandu in stable condition. “He has returned with a second life,” Hira Shobha Maharjan said. “We could neither eat nor sleep.” Sah believes three or four people near him may still be alive, with others deeper toward the powerhouse. Arnold Dix, the Australian tunnel engineer who led the Silkyara rescue in 2023 and is now advising in Nuwakot, has spent the week insisting that “silence is not evidence of death. It is only the absence of a signal.” About 115 workers are still thought to be in Trishuli 3A’s main tunnel, and roughly 500 across twelve projects. At Upper Trishuli 1, the largest construction site on the river, 557 of 1,433 people on site are still unaccounted for (Euronews, The Kathmandu Post). Graves With Numbers The hardest arithmetic of this disaster is now identification. Of the 1,252 bodies recovered by Thursday, 95 had been matched to a name and given back. Nepal Police say around 400 are partial remains. The river carried people so far, and the monsoon heat is so unforgiving, that morgues in Chitwan filled within days. So the state has begun burying the unidentified in forest trenches outside Bharatpur under Red Cross protocols: each body in its own place, a tag fixed to a remaining limb, a sequential code beginning BHF-01, a concrete marker, a GPS fix, a photograph and a video record. A DNA sample is taken from every one before burial. Families of the missing can give their own sample at any district hospital, and if it matches, the body can be recovered and returned for proper rites. A 19-member Indian forensic team has been working alongside Nepal Police since Monday. Some families have objected that burial is not the Hindu way; others have performed cremation rites over kusha-grass effigies while they wait. Writing in the Kathmandu Post, geneticist Dibesh Karmacharya argued that this is the moment to build a single coordinated identification system, combining DNA with fingerprints, dental records and belongings, rather than improvising district by district (The Tribune, The Kathmandu Post). In Brief: Three things the search has taught us this week. * The satellites saw it coming. Geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech ran European Sentinel-1 radar data from 8 January to 18 August through the slope above Lhende Khola. The glacier and the rock beneath it were creeping at around 10 millimetres a month, and speeding up. “The acceleration is more important than the velocity,” he said. Nobody was watching that slope, because Himalayan warning systems are built for lakes bursting, not for mountains letting go (Gizmodo, ABC Australia). * The risk has not passed. Rain is continuing in the upper catchments and the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology kept the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli at high flash-flood risk on Thursday, with moderate risk on smaller rivers in 32 districts. The barrier lake that worried everyone last week drained slowly and was largely empty by 30 August (The Kathmandu Post). * Six hundred children. Education officials in Rasuwa count 280 students unaccounted for; Nuwakot counts 300 to 350. Twelve schools are gone entirely, 22 teachers and staff are missing, and in one ward of Amachhodingmo 58 parents are. “In some cases we have located surviving parents who cannot find their children,” said Bidur’s school inspector Navaraj Sapkota, “and in other instances surviving students are searching for missing parents” (The Kathmandu Post). 🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation Still Missing, and Coming Home Around 590 foreign nationals from more than thirty countries remained unaccounted for as of Wednesday, most of them last known to be in Rasuwa on the Gosaikunda and Kailash routes; a further 300 have been rescued, 273 of them by Army helicopter. The American figure, which the State Department put at 90 last week, had come down to about 75 by Tuesday, with 14 confirmed safe and no confirmed American deaths. Thirty-three Latvians, 33 Britons, 38 Australians and 32 Canadians are still on the lists. On the Tibetan side, some 2,500 Kailash pilgrims have been flown out through Lhasa. The week’s quiet good news came at Tatopani on Thursday, when Chinese officials handed 114 Nepalis who had been stranded in Gyirong back across the border at Liping, most of them from Rasuwa, and three buses took them to Kathmandu and on to whatever is left of home. Another 33 are expected to follow. If your relative is among the missing, the Nepal Tourism Board hotline remains 1234 (toll-free in Nepal) or 1144, and your own foreign ministry is running casework (The Kathmandu Post, ABC News, The Tribune). What the Diaspora Did in Week Two The first week was vigils. The second has been money, and organisation. In Britain, Tamu Dhin UK has pledged more than Rs 10 million, part of it from a charity trail walk on 11 to 13 September; the Nepalese Doctors’ Association UK gave Rs 1.1 million, IME London gave Rs 1 million and waived fees on relief transfers, and Bexley Nepali Samaj raised £6,500 at a single vigil. The two rival NRNA UK committees are each raising separately, one of them describing its role as “watchdog” over the other’s money, which tells you something about the state of that organisation. In South Korea, about 60 Nepali groups are collecting; twenty migrant workers from Sudurpashchim pooled 920,000 won between them, and NRNA Korea is setting up a memorial space near Dongdaemun. “Those of us earning money abroad should help our homeland when it is going through such hardship,” one of them said. In Canada, Teej celebrations in Toronto, Brampton and Calgary were called off, and the Nepali Canadian Women’s Society of BC turned $15,000 of ticket sales into relief. Canberra cancelled its 400-person Teej on 6 September. And inside Nepal, schoolchildren in Achham, Kapilvastu, Rautahat and Kathmandu gave up their snack money, a few hundred rupees at a time (OnlineKhabar, The Korea Times, CP24, The Kathmandu Post). In Brief: Practical notes for readers abroad. * Where the money goes now. After a week of criticism, relief distribution in Rasuwa and Nuwakot was handed on 1 September from the security forces to local governments, working through six-party committees. The Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund stood at about Rs 7.77 billion on Wednesday. The police warning about fake accounts and QR codes we carried last week still stands: take bank details only from the Prime Minister’s Office website (The Kathmandu Post). * The Prime Minister goes to New York. Balendra Shah will lead Nepal’s delegation to the UN General Assembly, his first foreign trip since taking office in March, to put the flood before the world as a climate case. The high-level debate opens on 22 September. Expect community events around it (The Kathmandu Post). * If you are in the United States, note the date. The new public charge rule takes effect on 18 September. From that day, immigration officers may weigh any means-tested benefit, including food or housing assistance, when deciding a green card or adjustment application, an
