The wall outside Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, is covered with photographs of people who have not come home.
Relatives look through the rows, stopping at faces they recognize and continuously checking for any new information. For families whose loved ones disappeared in the devastating floods along the Nepal-Tibet border in August, the wall has become a place to wait, search, and hope. Some people were swept away by mountain rivers; others disappeared when floodwaters carrying mud, rocks, and debris tore through villages and hydropower sites.
Because the floods plowed through forests and steep mountain terrain, rescuers have struggled to find missing persons. Routes into some of the worst-hit areas were cut off, turning rescue into a struggle against the landscape itself. The death toll has climbed to more than 1,200, while thousands remain missing.
Nine days after the floods, two workers at a hydropower plant in Nepal’s Rasuwa District became the first survivors to be rescued from a hydropower plant across the affected areas. But weeks later, many other families still do not know whether their loved ones are alive. There is no body to bury, no grave to visit, and no final goodbye. For now, there is only the wall of photographs and the wait for news.
Among those searching is thirty-two-year-old Sarita Ghale, whose five family members remain unaccounted for. “If we cannot find them alive, then at least we want to find their bodies,” Ghale says. “That is our only hope.”
The destruction began with a surge of glacial water that rushed through Nepal’s mountain valleys, leaving communities downstream little time to prepare or evacuate. A landslide near the Nepal-Tibet border caused a flood that travelled sixty-two miles and washed away homes, roads, and bridges.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates the floods affected more than 84,000 people across seventeen municipalities and accumulated about 2.2 million tons of debris. The Nepalese government has reported that the country faces $2.56 billion in property, housing, and infrastructure damage.
The disaster unfolded in a Himalaya region that is changing rapidly. Across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, glaciers are losing ice at an accelerating rate: The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development reported in March that the rate of ice loss across the mountain range has doubled since 2000, while glaciers lost about 12 percent of their total area between 1990 and 2020. The region is also seeing more unstable conditions around glaciers, permafrost, and mountain slopes, increasing the potential for cascading hazards such as landslides, debris flows, and glacial lake outburst floods.
Scientists studying the August disaster say climate change should be understood as one factor that may have weakened an already unstable mountain system. A recent assessment by World Weather Attribution found that warming and permafrost degradation likely weakened the rock wall involved in the disaster, while glacier thinning, retreat, and increased meltwater may also have contributed to slope instability. The researchers found that temperatures in July and August near the disaster site were substantially warmer than the historical average, but said they had not assessed whether the specific rock-and-ice avalanche would have occurred without human-caused climate change.
For Nepal, the consequences of these changes are particularly stark. The country contributes only about 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Bank, yet its economy and communities are highly exposed to climate-related floods, landslides, water stress, and glacial hazards. In the mountains, hazards can move rapidly from high-altitude slopes into valleys where people live, work, and build infrastructure.
Suriya Bahadur is waiting for rescuers to find his brother, who lived in a nearby village with his wife and child. While Bahadur waits for news, he lives with the agony of uncertainty. For families of the missing, a body is devastating, but it is also an answer. Without it, grief has nowhere to settle.
“I know he may be dead,” he says. “But I cannot believe it until I see his body.”
When the floods began, twenty-eight-year-old Ramesh (who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation) was working inside a tunnel under a hydropower plant in the Rasuwa District. Water inundated the tunnel, causing panic among workers, says Anil, who was working with Ramesh in the tunnel and similarly requested a pseudonym. They soon began shouting for help.
“We wanted to go outside, but our supervisor told us to keep working,” Anil says. Soon, their cell signal was disrupted. Outside, families were left calling phones that no longer connected, with no way to know what was happening underground.
A sudden rush of air was followed by a power outage that plunged the tunnel into darkness. One exit was blocked, forcing the workers to search for another way out. “For a moment, we thought we would not make it out,” Ramesh says. Several workers managed to escape through the other side of the tunnel, while others remained trapped.
In the wake of the catastrophic floods, Nepal has to grapple with its development of hydropower as one of its primary economic growth strategies. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Nepalese government increasingly turned its focus to hydropower to address chronic electricity shortages within the country and export electricity to India and Bangladesh—building projects and roads through some of the world’s most geologically fragile terrain. That push has made hydropower central to Nepal’s energy system, while also increasing the country’s exposure to floods and other climate-related hazards in the Himalayas.
Because hydropower plants rely on the flow of water to produce energy, they’re often built in mountains along rivers, making workers vulnerable to seismic and flooding events. There are currently about 900 hydropower plant workers missing beneath the mountains, hundreds of whom are believed to be trapped inside tunnels, according to army rescuers who spoke to Reuters. At a plant on the Nepal-Tibet border in Rasuwagadhi, authorities are examining reports that dozens of workers may still be alive inside an underground chamber. But rescuers are working through a landscape transformed by the flood: Tunnel entrances are blocked, roads leading to project locations have been washed away, and sections of underground passages are buried under mud and rock.
At least eleven operating hydropower stations and one solar plant were damaged, according to a preliminary UNDP assessment, while fifteen additional hydropower projects under construction were also affected.
The disaster has also raised questions about Nepal’s warning and evacuation systems for hydropower workers and communities downstream in an increasingly unstable mountain environment. The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development reported a rapid rise in water levels in the Bhote Koshi basin on the morning of the August flooding, but it’s unclear whether warnings reached workers inside the tunnels in time to allow them to evacuate.
The Nepalese government has been working to strengthen early-warning systems and incorporate climate risks into infrastructure planning, but there are still major gaps. The World Bank has identified early-warning systems and climate-resilient infrastructure as priorities for Nepal, while the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development has been developing climate-risk assessment guidelines specifically for hydropower projects. Earlier this year, researchers also found limited monitoring of glaciers and other high-altitude hazards, leaving some downstream communities exposed to risks that can be difficult to detect in time.
As glaciers retreat and mountain hazards become harder to predict, uncertainty remains over which entity is responsible for turning information about risks high in the mountains into warnings, evacuation plans, and protections for people living downstream. Nepal’s government agencies, hydropower companies, and local authorities all have roles to play, but the latest flood event exposed the consequences when hazards move faster than systems designed to manage them.
For Sitaram Shah, a survivor in his sixties, the flood did not end when the water receded. It left him facing the harder task of surviving life without his mother and father. He now carries the weight of losing the people he depended on and the financial burden left behind in the wake of the disaster.
“The flood took away the people I depended on and left me with debt, disrupted work and a future I had never planned for,” Shah says.
For survivors like Shah, the flood did not just wash away their homes and possessions—it disrupted the lives built around them, the work that paid the bills, and the families that gave those lives meaning.
And debt does not disappear when a flood does. Families will have to find ways to survive while they search for relatives, repair what they can, and begin again. For Shah and thousands of other survivors, the timeline for recovery will stretch far beyond the rescue operation.
Their rescue did not resolve the fate of those still missing, but it showed families who have spent weeks waiting that the search is not necessarily over. Someone trapped beneath the mountains can still come home.
A building can be rebuilt. A bridge can be replaced. A power station can be repaired. But for those waiting for a missing relative, there is no equivalent measure of loss.
Outside Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, the photographs remain on the wall, and families keep waiting for a phone call, a rescue, or—if hope gives way—a body to bring home.