Members of the Nepal Army paddle an inflatable boat on Monday to retrieve bodies that were washed away by the recent flooding.Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
Brabim Karki is a writer and columnist based in Nepal.
It has been a terrible week in Nepal, and the numbers alone don’t begin to tell the story.
On Wednesday, a giant torrent of water, mud and ice swept away villages and destroyed roads and infrastructure near the Nepal-China border. By Monday, the death toll in Nepal had climbed to at least 903, with more than 4,000 people still unaccounted for, with 592 of them foreigners, according to the latest data released by the government of Nepal. And on the Tibet side of the border, at least 16 people have been killed with 500 missing, according to Chinese authorities. Nepalese officials said on Monday the focus was on reaching the 900 workers believed to be trapped inside hydropower tunnels and various projects.
The U.S. State Department said on Sunday that about 85 U.S. citizens were missing, adding that nine had been rescued; Canada’s foreign ministry reported that 30 Canadians in both Nepal and Tibet were among the missing. Ottawa announced $5-million in humanitarian assistance funding to support emergency relief efforts, and after initially announcing a $500,000 contribution, Washington eventually announced more than US$3.6-million in humanitarian aid Saturday.
What’s more, this is the second time in 13 months that this stretch of the Trishuli River has drowned the same villages. A flood on July 8, 2025, which also originated upstream, killed at least nine people, swept away the bridge linking Nepal and China and wrecked the Rasuwagadhi dry port.
The response to both disasters by the Nepalese government has been swift, as Prime Minister Balendra Shah has followed the same script as his predecessor Khadga Prasad Oli: an emergency cabinet meeting, evacuation orders, sending helicopters as the waters rushed. But what this disaster demonstrated is not a lack of ability to respond. What is troubling is that reacting quickly remains one of the few tools available, and only once a disaster is already under way.
Scientists are still working to determine the actual cause of the flood. Officials initially assumed it had crossed into Nepal from a glacial lake that burst in Tibet, but satellite analysis by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, working with counterparts in Nepal and China, now points to an ice-and-rock avalanche that fell into the Lhende Khola, a tributary roughly 40 to 50 kilometres upstream of the border, damming the river until the accumulated water broke through. A magnitude 4.4 earthquake was also recorded on the Tibetan side minutes before the flood hit, and researchers are still trying to determine whether the tremor triggered the avalanche or was itself generated by the mass of falling ice and rock. Meanwhile, danger still hangs in the air, as officials on the Chinese side have stated that a barrier lake at the confluence of the Tsogyal and Purupqiangzangbu rivers was overflowing and could also burst.
Nepalese police officers carry a survivor of the flooding to safety in the village of Devighat.Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
The 2025 floods wiped out the stretch of road connecting the village of Syabrubesi to the border crossing at Rasuwagadhi. This vital corridor was only partially rebuilt, but every rupee spent on that reconstruction was a bet that the river would behave. It didn’t. Rebuilding the same infrastructure in the same fragile location, without better early-warning systems, is not resilience. It is merely repetition, and expecting different results.
Bigger changes need to be made to try to avert the next disaster. While a China-Nepal flash flood early-warning system exists, the upstream monitoring stations were swept away before alerts could be sent. Kathmandu cannot compel China to share real-time hydrological data on its own territory to create a more effective warning system. Bilateral data-sharing agreements on transboundary rivers exist elsewhere in the region, including with India, so Nepal doesn’t need to guess what one would look like; it just needs the will to negotiate one before the third flood. But even if Kathmandu succeeds in doing so, it must also understand that no warning system will ever be foolproof when dealing with a border that sits on some of the most unstable glacial terrain on Earth.
Syabrubesi will rebuild, as it did last year. The road will reopen. The hydropower plants along the riverbanks will be back online, and life along the Trishuli will settle back into its routine. But Nepal will not be meaningfully safer unless policy-makers start treating the transboundary watershed as a standing security and disaster-preparedness problem rather than a recurring emergency.