Nepal flash flood
Published: 12:37 AM, 28 August 2026
Death toll crosses 350, over 1,500 missing
Damaged houses stand precariously near the swollen, debris-choked banks of the Trishuli river after flash floods in Nepal's Nuwakot district. -Agency
The death toll in the Nepalese flash flood has crossed 350 while more than 1,500 remain missing.
A catastrophic glacial collapse triggered flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday, with rescue officials putting the odds of finding survivors at just 1 percent.
Nepal police issued the latest toll at 3:50pm local time on Thursday, a day after walls of water and debris tore through villages across a 40 to 50km stretch of the Himalayas, wiping out settlements entirely, reports The Independent.
Among the missing are 33 British tourists, including a 13-year-old girl, as well as nearly 800 foreign nationals in total.
Bishal Nath Upreti, president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management, described the disaster as a "tsunami from the sky."
Scientists believe a massive chunk of glacial ice broke away and temporarily blocked a river, causing water to build up before surging downstream with devastating force hours later.
The US Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 5.2 glacier collapse, confirmed through seismic data and satellite imagery.
Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz currently based in Bangladesh, said the lower section of a glacier had sheared away entirely.
"If you look at the imagery, it's like someone cut with a huge knife through the whole lower part and it fell off," he said, adding that the impact of glacial ice falling from such a height could have felt like a bomb detonating.
Investigators are still analysing satellite and ground-level data to establish a precise sequence of events.
>>Agency
