BIDUR, Nepal — The overwhelming stench of death is crushing hopes that more survivors will be found in this Nepalese town devastated by last week’s catastrophic floods. Workers in white hazmat suits unload bodies from a stream of ambulances in Bidur, a town in Nepal’s Nuwakot district on Tuesday. They place the wrapped bodies onto blue tarp in a cordoned off area.
Helicopters, both military and civilian aircraft that in better days would be used for commercial tours, take off packed with aid before returning with survivors in need of medical care. Kalpana Shrestha, a nurse who works in capital Kathmandu, is desperate. Ten members of her family are missing — her two sisters and their children — are missing.
She added that her loved ones disappeared in Betrawati, a town some 60 miles from the capital that was obliterated in the flooding. But even so, we have not stopped posting.” More than 1,000 have been declared dead in Nepal after last week’s devastating floods, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. Over 3,915 others are still missing, including at least 583 foreign nationals.
In Tibet, at least 16 people were killed and 546 are missing, according to CGTN, China’s English-language satellite news channel. At least 80 Americans are among the missing in Nepal. More than 10,000 people have been rescued so far, including 252 foreign nationals, the United Nations says.
The disaster, which was triggered by a glacier collapse and landslide on Nepal’s border with China, is now considered Nepal’s deadliest natural disaster since the April 2015 earthquake that killed around 9,000 people in Nepal. Shrestha said she felt that the government was “not doing enough work to search and rescue to locate” her family. She also noted that access to her village was still difficult after the floods.
And the bodies that have been recovered pose a huge challenge to authorities, who are using at least 21 hospitals in a string of districts to store remains, according to Nepal’s disaster agency. In some cases, bodies are being buried to prevent any risk of infection, with hopes they will be later identified so the remains can be returned to loved ones. Speaking with NBC News in Pokhara, Nabin Karki, a superintendent of police, said authorities were collecting DNA samples and display photos of the bodies found so in hopes that family members might be able to identify them.
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