By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
KATHMANDU — The wall at the back of a Kathmandu teaching hospital tells you what officials won't say outright: they are running out of time and room.
Every few hours, staff hang new photographs there — pictures of the dead, mud-caked and mostly unidentified, some young, some old, nearly all men. Authorities are collecting DNA samples and making plans to bury bodies before the city's morgues fill past capacity, according to reporting from the ground in Kathmandu.
The floods struck the Nepal-Tibet border region, with the Gyirong Port area among the hardest hit. Footage from the scene showed a house at the border isolated by raging water, people stranded on its rooftop as the water rose around them.
At least 41 Australians remain missing, according to family members and Australian reporting. Among them is a woman who was at Gyirong Port minutes before the flood hit. Her partner and daughters, from Australia, are now trying to raise money to travel there themselves and join the search. Her sister, Clair Spry, said the missing woman would not want the attention on herself.
"Her focus right now would not be on her; it would be on the families," Spry said. "So many people, the Nepalese people, that have been horribly displaced and traumatised. She would want the attention on them and how we are going to help them."
That sentiment cuts to the heart of the disaster: a local catastrophe now entangled with a foreign search-and-rescue effort, playing out under the shadow of a warming climate that is making such floods more common and less predictable. Nepali authorities have not yet given a final death toll or timeline for identifying the dead. Readers should treat any early numbers as provisional — this is a story still being counted.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE —
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."