A flash flood swept down the Bhotekoshi river in Nepal’s Rasuwa district on the morning of 26 August, reaching the border settlement of Timure at around nine o’clock and running on through villages along the Trishuli valley. At one point downstream, researchers measured the river rising by as much as nine metres in half an hour.
By five o’clock on Thursday morning, Nepal Police counted 162 dead across seven districts — 64 in Chitwan, 27 in Dhading, 26 in Nawalparasi East, 20 in Gorkha, 12 in Nuwakot, nine in Tanahun, and two each in Rasuwa and Nawalparasi West — with 41 people in hospital. The count had stood at 72 on Wednesday evening; every figure is provisional while recoveries continue downstream.
Officials put those unaccounted for on the Nepali side at 403, of whom 341 are foreign nationals — the tourism board’s list includes 133 Indians, 47 Americans, 34 Australians, 33 Britons and 24 Canadians. Across the border in Tibet’s Gyirong county, Chinese state media reported three dead and 558 missing. Rasuwagadhi is one of the two principal road crossings between Nepal and China, which is why so many of the missing are travellers rather than residents.
What set the water moving has not been officially established. The US Geological Survey recorded a magnitude-5.2 seismic signal consistent with a glacial collapse rather than an earthquake, and mountain specialists point to an ice-and-rock avalanche into the Lhende Khola — the second flood on that river in fourteen months. A meteorologist at Nepal’s Flood Forecasting Division said satellite imagery showed the water had not come from rain over Rasuwa itself.
The flood took police posts at Timure and Syaphrubesi, bank branches and hydropower works, nineteen motorable bridges and forty kilometres of road. Glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya have been losing ice at roughly double the rate seen before 2000; the valleys below them inherit that arithmetic.