Nepal holds national day of mourning after floods kill more than 1300

Nepal marked an official day of mourning after floods on August 26 killed more than 1,300 people across Nepal and Tibet, according to WTOP citing Nepal’s disaster management agency. Flags were lowered at government offices as families completed 13-day mourning rituals common in the country’s Hindu tradition. Search operations continued for thousands reported missing, with relatives gathering in Kathmandu near the prime minister’s office and key ministries to demand faster rescue work.

The protests are tied to a specific bottleneck: hydropower construction sites concentrated along river valleys. WTOP reports that rescue efforts have focused on 12 hydropower projects, where about 900 workers are missing and roughly 500 are believed trapped in tunnels. At one site, the Trishuli hydropower plant project office was described as completely buried by debris, with families saying they had not heard of rescue attempts there nearly two weeks after the flood.

The flood response has also exposed what “preparedness” looks like when the hardest part is moving heavy equipment into remote terrain after roads and bridges fail. Relatives told WTOP that authorities sent a small excavator by helicopter only on the sixth or seventh day, and protesters argued that larger helicopters and equipment should have been requested from neighbours such as China or India sooner. Specialized teams from India, China, South Korea, and the United States have been involved in the search, but the work is still described as digging through debris, damaged structures, and tunnels—tasks that depend less on declarations and more on lift capacity, machinery, and time.

Hydropower projects sit at the intersection of national ambition and concentrated risk. They bring investment and future electricity, but they also place large workforces in tunnels and river corridors where floods and landslides convert infrastructure into traps. When projects are spread across multiple sites, responsibility fragments among contractors, developers, and agencies, and the first full accounting of who was on shift can come after the river has already carried away the evidence.

WTOP reports that two Nepalese workers were rescued from a plant on Friday and a Chinese man was pulled out on Saturday. On Monday, some families performed symbolic funerals without bodies, a ritual meant to provide spiritual closure when recovery has not caught up with the missing-person lists.

In Kathmandu, relatives stood outside government offices asking for bigger helicopters and faster digging. In the river valleys, the missing were still being counted by the tunnels they had entered.