Faced with the scale of the disaster and the titanic tasks, Nepal buried victims of the devastating flood on the border with China on Monday August 31, without even waiting for their identification or the end of relief operations.
More than 3,000 people – 2,502 in Nepal and 546 in China – including many foreigners, remain missing on both sides of the border, in this region of the Himalayas, isolated and popular with mountaineers and pilgrims. The disaster has already caused nearly 800 deaths – 781 on the Nepalese side, 16 on the Tibetan side to be precise – and considerable damage.
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Rescuers are working tirelessly, in perilous conditions and despite the risks caused by a new rise in water, hoping in particular to save around a hundred workers stuck in a tunnel. But five days later, the hope of finding survivors in the sea of mud and debris which has ravaged entire villages is diminishing.
Families and loved ones of the missing flock to hospitals and morgues to try to find their loved ones, particularly in Bharatpur, in southern Nepal, where images of corpses flash on a screen.
The power of the waves carried some 250 corpses to his district, that of Chitwan, more than a hundred kilometers downstream from the disaster.
Shobha Adhikary is convinced: the lifeless body lying along a river is that of her childhood friend. “It’s clear, it looks like him,” she assures a volunteer. But only identification by DNA will make it possible to ensure the identity of the victim, warns the volunteer.
DNA samples taken
A long and difficult work carried out under pressure of time: on Sunday, for health reasons, the Nepalese authorities began to bury victims without even waiting for the identification of the remains, for reasons of public health.
These burials take place after taking a DNA sample, the authorities said, and on a provisional basis for victims of Hindu faith. It will allow their families, after their formal identification, to exhume them and burn them, as tradition dictates.
“Many bodies have been recovered and they have started to decompose,” explained the secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amrit Bahadur Rai.
The cause, in particular: infrastructures that are undersized in relation to the number of bodies. The Bharatpur morgue could only accommodate around twenty, so the authorities had to store the corpses in air-conditioned premises of the traders’ association.
In Devghat, in the same district, where still unidentified victims were buried, the police placed numbers at their burial site, according to AFP images. Several dozen were stored and ready for use.
Calls for caution in the face of new dangers
The work of rescuers is under threat of a new disaster: on the Chinese side, rescuers working in Tibet were “moved to a safe place” after the formation of a new reservoir, caused by a landslide, according to state media.
And in Nepal, authorities called for “caution” due to the increased flow of the Bhotekoshi River, in the Rasuwa district (north).
Also readNepal-Tibet: what threat does the reservoir formed by the flood represent?
Rescuers hope in particular to find workers alive in a tunnel at the Trishuli-3 hydroelectric dam site (north). There are around a hundred of them, according to the authorities.
On Sunday, “rescuers abseiled with ropes into the tunnel (…) and tried to make contact with its occupants, but they did not get a response,” the Prime Minister’s office said.
The objective now is to widen the breach, notably with explosives, to allow rescuers equipped with oxygen masks to enter the tunnel. Some 80 Nepalese rescuers were mobilized to try to extract the workers, assisted by teams from India, China and South Korea.
With AFP
