World News
Nepal lowers its flags on the thirteenth day as the flood toll passes 1,300 and 5,000 are still missing
By Staff Writer | 8 September 2026
The government declared Monday a day of mourning but held no ceremonies, because the search is still going on. About 900 hydropower workers are among the missing and roughly 500 are thought to be inside tunnels. Families of the missing gathered outside the Prime Minister's office to ask for a faster search.
Nepal marked the thirteenth day since the flood of 26 August with a national day of mourning on Monday. The Home Ministry ordered the national flag flown at half mast at government offices and at missions abroad. In the Hindu tradition the thirteenth day closes the mourning period, during which close family stay at home and relatives visit, and rituals are held on the last day for the souls of the dead. Candlelight vigils were held in several places in Kathmandu on Monday evening.
Nepal's disaster management agency puts the toll at more than 1,300 dead in Nepal and Tibet and some 5,000 missing, foreigners among them. The count moves daily and the hosts that carried it on Monday gave slightly different totals for the same day; the figure that does not move is the scale. On the Tibetan side of the border, Chinese state media reported 31 dead and 531 unaccounted for on Friday, and rescue workers there recovered twelve bodies on Sunday using excavators and ground-penetrating radar.
There are no government programmes organised as the rescue and search operation is still going on in the flood-hit areas
Phanindra Paudel, National Emergency Operation Centre, Nepal
President Ram Chandra Paudel, the ceremonial head of state, toured flood-hit areas on Monday, according to an aide. The scaled-back commemoration reflects a search that has not stopped. The army's spokesperson, Raja Ram Basnet, said rescue efforts were continuing with the same tempo as on the first day.
Our focus is on search and rescue at three levels - on ground, by air, and in the tunnels
Raja Ram Basnet, spokesperson for the Nepal Army
The tunnels
The search is concentrated on 12 hydropower projects, where about 900 workers are missing and roughly 500 are believed to be trapped in tunnels, according to the authorities. Specialised teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States are working through debris, damaged structures and the tunnels themselves. Arnold Dix, the Australian tunnel rescue expert advising the Nepali teams, described the operation as multiple potential rescues unfolding at the same time in different places, each with its own dangers and uncertainties.
Four people have been rescued in recent days. Two Nepali workers were brought out of a tunnel on Friday, and a Chinese man was pulled from a hydropower site on Saturday. On the same day a 64-year-old woman, Chandika Shrestha, was found alive on the fourth floor of her partially buried house in Nuwakot district by the Armed Police Force, more than ten days after the wall of ice, rock and mud reached it, and was airlifted to hospital in Kathmandu.
The families outside the Prime Minister's office
In Kathmandu, relatives of missing hydropower workers gathered near the offices of the Prime Minister and the main ministries on Monday to ask for a faster search for the hundreds of people who were on shift at the plants when the river came through. Sumana Shrestha held a poster of her 55-year-old husband, a consulting geologist who had promised to come home after his shift at the project office of the Trishuli scheme. That two-and-a-half-storey office is buried. She said the family had heard of no rescue attempt at the project after thirteen days and that the only thing they had been able to do was pray. Another relative, Mahesh Prasad Shrestha, whose brother Niraj, a 52-year-old engineer, worked at the same site, said a small excavator had reached the site by helicopter on the sixth or seventh day and asked for larger helicopters to fly in equipment.
The flood was set off when a glacier broke away above the valley on the Nepal and Tibet border and sent a wall of mud and rock into the river. Thirteen days on, the question in Kathmandu is not what happened but how fast the men still underground can be reached, and whether it is already too late for most of them. The tunnel crews were still digging on Monday.