Nepal and China temporarily suspended search and rescue efforts on Friday over a new flood threat along the Himalayan border. A lake formed by Wednesday’s massive glacial collapse had begun to overflow.
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The death toll from the devastating flood continues to climb, with hundreds still missing on both sides of the Nepal-Tibet border. Reporting from the remote disaster zone remains inconsistent, but authorities now say more than 450 people are dead and more than 1,400 are still unaccounted for.
Americans among the missing
The U.S. State Department says about 90 Americans may have been affected in Nepal and China. Three have been rescued, and so far, there are no known American deaths.
President Donald Trump called the disaster a “terrible thing” Thursday. He said the U.S. has offered to provide whatever help is needed.
“We are sending aid and we’ve spoken to the leadership and we let them know anything they want we’ll have,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “And there were 50, maybe 60 Americans over there. We haven’t gotten the full list yet, but hopefully they’re okay, but that looked pretty, that looks like something that people will not be, somebody will be lost, unfortunately.”
What triggered the disaster
Scientists are now getting a clearer picture of what triggered the disaster.
Scientists studying satellite images say bedrock beneath a glacier on Langtang Lirung peak collapsed, sending huge amounts of ice, rock and debris crashing into the valley below.
“It looked like there was not only this glacier that had failed, but a much larger chunk of the bedrock of the mountainside itself that had given way,” geomorphologist Dan Shugar told The Associated Press. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates more than 100 million cubic meters of material was displaced. That’s the equivalent of 40,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Kristen Cook, another geomorphologist, told the AP that after slamming into the valley floor, the debris maintained its momentum through the steep, narrow valley as ice melted — sending water and mud several stories high as they swept through communities.
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