By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
An Australian believed missing after catastrophic floods tore through the Nepal-Tibet border has turned up alive, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Tuesday.
The person made contact with DFAT officials from Tibet, according to The Guardian, becoming one of 43 Australians who had gone unaccounted for since flash flooding devastated the remote Gyirong Port trade crossing last week. The area, a vital link between Nepal and China, was left almost entirely cut off by the disaster.
More than 100 Indians remain missing at the same crossing, the BBC reported, many of them Hindu pilgrims making an arduous trek to a sacred mountain on a journey of devotion. NPR reported that among the hundreds still unaccounted for on the border are pilgrims from India and beyond who had set out for the same route.
The scale of the flooding — and the remoteness of the trade post it struck — has made even basic accounting of the missing slow going. One confirmed survivor is good news for one family, but it does not change the arithmetic facing search teams working a cut-off mountain crossing with communications badly damaged. Governments in Canberra, New Delhi and Kathmandu are still working, days later, to simply determine who was there when the water came.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian, the BBC and NPR.
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."