Grieving families gathered at Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple on Wednesday to perform symbolic funeral rites for relatives still unaccounted for more than a week after catastrophic flash floods tore through northern and central Nepal, as the confirmed death toll rose to 1,252.
Police said nearly 4,900 people remain missing, up from roughly 3,900 the previous day. The heaviest losses were recorded in Chitawan district, where 355 bodies have been recovered, followed by Nawalparasi East and West with a combined total above 400, and Nuwakot with 177. Smaller numbers of victims were also recovered in Rasuwa, Gorkha, Dhading and Tahanu districts. Chinese authorities reported an additional 16 deaths and roughly 550 missing across the border in Tibet.
The disaster was triggered on August 26 by the sudden collapse of a glacier near the Nepal-Tibet border, unleashing a torrent of ice, rock and water that buried villages and swept away infrastructure across the Himalayan region. Search teams led by Nepal’s army have now been working for nine consecutive days, though officials say the odds of finding survivors are diminishing.
With so many bodies unrecovered and morgues overwhelmed, many families have turned to ritual substitutes for burial. At Pashupatinath, mourners cremated effigies in place of bodies, following Hindu tradition that calls for cremation to release the soul, even when no remains are available. One family performed the rite for four missing members of a single household.
Authorities said most communication networks in the disaster zone have since been restored and that roughly 12,000 people have been pulled to safety with the help of domestic and international rescue teams. Nepal’s prime minister said this week that the government is beginning to shift its focus from search-and-rescue toward longer-term rehabilitation, even as the scale of the catastrophe continues to raise questions about the impact of glacial melt linked to climate change.
