By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The mud in Nuwakot district is still wet enough to swallow a boot. Survivors are digging through it anyway, hunting for what's left of their homes after flash floods triggered by a glacier collapse in the Himalayas tore through Nepal and spilled across the border into Tibet.
The death toll has surpassed 900, according to Nepali officials cited by Al Jazeera, and rescue crews are now concentrating on hydropower project tunnels where workers are believed trapped. The scale of the search reflects how fast the water moved — fast enough to catch laborers underground and villagers in their beds.
The disaster has become an international emergency by sheer number of the missing. A State Department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that roughly 85 Americans remain unaccounted for, though nine have been evacuated safely. Australian officials, meanwhile, say the number of missing Australians has climbed to 43, with the overall death toll cited at more than 810 as of Monday — a discrepancy in tallies that underscores how fluid, and grim, the counting still is days after the collapse.
The human toll has bred an ugly sideshow. The Guardian reports that Australians missing in the floods have been targeted with racist slurs on social media, prompting community leaders to call the comments "heartbreaking" and "abhorrent" and to demand platforms do more to police hateful rhetoric aimed at grieving families.
For now, the work in Nepal is unglamorous and physical: shifting debris by hand, listening for voices in collapsed tunnels, counting the dead. No government statement changes what's under the mud. Only digging does.
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera, The Guardian and The Hill.
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