The official death toll from the avalanche that struck the Nepal-China border on August 26 passed 1,000 on Tuesday. Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority raised the country's count to 987, and Chinese state media confirmed 16 deaths in the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Himalayan territory controlled by Beijing, bringing the two-country total to 1,003, according to the Brazilian news site G1 and the daily Folha de S.Paulo, which cite the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
The disaster began when a glacier collapsed on the border and sent a wave of icy water and debris over whole villages and a corridor of hydroelectric plants. Authorities in both countries say 4,462 people are still missing, 3,916 of them in Nepal and 546 in Tibet. In 24 hours, the number unaccounted for in Nepal jumped from 2,502 to 3,925, according to figures reported by BBC News Brasil. In India, the state of Uttar Pradesh has recovered 17 bodies from rivers that officials believe belonged to victims swept downstream; they are not in the official count. If the missing are confirmed dead, the tragedy could approach the April 2015 earthquake, which killed about 9,000 people in Nepal.
For Brazil, the most direct reading sits in the lists of the missing: no Brazilians appear in the tallies compiled by Nepal's tourism department and embassies, which include 275 Indians plus another 128 people of Indian origin, and 85 Americans according to the United States Department of State, along with 62 Ukrainians, 51 Malaysians, 42 Australians and 33 Britons. The disaster also reaches an agenda Brazil helped lead: as host of the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belem in November 2025, the country put financing for nations exposed to extreme weather at the center of the debate. Brazil knows the problem at home; floods in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul killed more than 180 people in 2024.
A border of interests
The tragedy lays bare the interests that meet in this stretch of the Himalayas. Over the past decade Nepal has bet on a hydropower boom in Rasuwa district, on the border with Tibet, drawn by the water of steep rivers and by proximity to China, and the expansion pulled in workers from across the country; according to The New York Times, cited by BBC News Brasil, Chinese capital is behind many of those projects. Beijing, which controls Tibet and releases casualty figures from the region through state media, sent specialists to the search, alongside teams from India and South Korea. New Delhi is watching closely: Indians account for one of the largest shares of the missing foreigners. Among the unaccounted for in Nepal are 639 workers tied to hydropower projects, according to the BBC.
A race against time in the tunnels
Searches focus on the hydropower complex where hundreds of workers may be trapped. The wave of water and mud destroyed about 13 projects along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers, and suspicion falls on the Trishuli-3A plant, built between 2011 and 2019, whose headrace tunnel runs more than 4 kilometers. About 90 rescuers are using heavy machinery, drones, sniffer dogs and controlled explosions to force their way in; they have opened an access roughly 10 meters deep and sent messages through the gap, but "received no response from inside", the prime minister's office reported. Around 300 workers have been rescued so far. "These tunnels are big enough for trucks to pass through. There is enough space for people to take shelter there," Jakob Steiner, a professor at the University of Graz in Austria, told the press. Sita Pandey, whose husband worked at Trishuli-3A, told the Nepali newspaper Kantipur: "I still have 50% hope that he is alive, because there is an oxygen system inside."
The exact cause of the glacier collapse remains unclear, but scientists cited by G1 say the Himalayas, the world's highest range, are thawing faster as global temperatures rise, which raises the risk of this kind of disaster. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said last week's avalanche "was not a common event", blamed it on climate change and demanded international measures. At the gates of the plants, hundreds of families are still waiting for news.