Nepal Flash Floods live updates: Death toll rises to 579, over 2,400 missing as battered nation seeks foreign help

Nepal Flash Floods live updates: Rescuers in Nepal and China were battling Saturday to locate more than 2,400 people missing after a deadly, tsunami-like wall of water and debris swept through the Himalayan region, engulfing villages.

Nepal reported 579 deaths on Friday, while 1,924 people, including 517 foreigners, remained out of contact in the country, according to the disaster authority. Across the border in Tibet, seven people had died and 554 remained missing, according to China's state news agency Xinhua.

The disaster has prompted Nepal to seek specialised foreign assistance. The country needs help with tunnel rescues, transporting, identifying and storing bodies, while it does not require foreign assistance for general search and rescue, Nepal's foreign minister told Reuters.

Nepal has also requested India and China for Bailey bridges, the foreign minister said.

Thousands remain missing

The number of missing people soared past 2,400 on Friday as emergency teams reported recovering 586 bodies, with some of the dead swept downstream as far as India.

Nepal's disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to its missing persons list, which already included trekkers and pilgrims travelling to Tibet's Mount Kailash.

In India, authorities recovered seven bodies from rivers flowing from Nepal, believed to be victims of the floods.

The Red Cross said as many as 93,000 people may have been affected, describing the trauma from Wednesday's catastrophe as “enormous” and warning that the death toll was expected to rise.

Survivors described widespread destruction.

“All the settlements near the river were swept away. There is nothing left,” survivor Buddhi Ram Dangol told AFP.

Samjhana Thing said she had been waiting three days for news of her missing brother.

“We don't know anything. Hopefully he is in a safe place,” she said.

Rescue efforts face fresh flood threat

Emergency teams have been racing to retrieve survivors from affected areas, where food and water supplies were running out.

The search has also been complicated by fears of further flooding. The deluge of ice and mud caused huge lakes to form, with one such formation posing a direct threat to emergency workers.

Nepali police urged rescuers to “immediately move to a safe location”, saying they had received information that “a water dam has burst again on the Tibetan side”.

In Tibet, Chinese authorities suspended their rescue operation in the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding before saying the threat had eased. Xinhua reported early Saturday that two villagers had been rescued there.

On the Nepali side, the military located people trapped inside a tunnel at the Trishuli 3A hydropower project and was working to extract them.

“Two helicopters have been dispatched, but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet told AFP.

About 350 workers and residents had been brought to safety from the site, he said, while efforts continued to rescue more than 100 people trapped in the same area.

Hydropower workers, pilgrims among missing

Workers at other dam projects along the Trishuli valley described a disaster that struck with terrifying speed.

Buddha Tamang said he survived because he was inside a tunnel at the dam where he worked when the flood struck.

“The senior officers working on the other side, they were all swept away,” Tamang told AFP. He was airlifted on Thursday after being stranded for more than 24 hours.

Scores of Hindu devotees from across the world are also among those missing along the border, with many travelling on pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet.

Sivaranjani Muthunathan, who was travelling by bus with 56 others towards the Chinese border, said they initially believed they were stuck in a traffic jam.

“Then there was fog, smoke, something that seemed to suddenly engulf us,” she told AFP, showing a video she had recorded of the torrent surging towards her.

Vehicles around them were swept away or buried under mud.

“One by one, we also climbed out through the driver's side,” she said, before describing how they scrambled up a hill.