State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Monday that 13 Americans have made their way to safety in Nepal and that 80 Americans remained unaccounted for at 9 a.m. Monday.
The State Department, he said, had “activated $3.6 million in humanitarian assistance, including lifesaving food assistance.” He added that the U.S. had “surged consular assistance to this area to make sure we are able to provide 24/7 support to Americans that need it out of our embassies in Beijing and Kathmandu.”
In Nepal, rescuers continue to struggle to reach devastated communities days after the massive flooding that stemmed from a glacier collapse near the country’s northern border with China’s Tibet region Wednesday.
Describing the disaster as “overwhelming,” Ferrin Cole, an operations director at Crisis Response International, a South Carolina-based relief organization, told NBC News on Sunday that “the flood that came down that mountain just wiped out cities.”
“We’re going in as fast as we can to get people the help that they need,” he said.
The disaster has affected more than 90,000 people, according to the Nepal Red Cross.
Morgues in the country have been overwhelmed, and in Chitwan district, which sits 125 miles from the disaster zone, authorities dug hundreds of graves in a forest at Devghat for bodies swept downstream from the flood-hit Rasuwa region.
“We were left with no other option,” Ganesh Aryal, chief district officer of Chitwan, told Reuters. “Our concern was the risk to public health posed by the rapid decomposition of the bodies.”
“More than half” of the bodies recovered there were “beyond recognition,” he added.
Elsewhere, rescue teams were attempting to reach the 933 workers believed to be trapped at 11 hydropower projects in the hard-hit districts of Rasuwa and Nuwakot.
Pictures and videos shared by rescue teams showed earth-moving equipment digging and shoveling mud and rocks under lights in the dark of night in a bid to find the workers, many of whom were thought to be in about half a dozen tunnels.
The Nepali army told The Associated Press that search-and-rescue teams were using controlled blasts, excavators and searchlights to clear water.
China has separately reported 16 deaths and 546 people missing in its Tibet region, including hundreds of foreigners. It is unclear how much overlap there is between the Chinese and Nepali missing-person counts.
Chinese state television broadcaster CCTV attributed the disaster to “glacier instability resulting from the long-term effects of climate warming” in a report Sunday. “It struck suddenly, with a large peak flow, high speed, severe destructive force and a wide impact area,” the broadcaster said.
A landslide-dammed lake above the border checkpoint is overflowing, further complicating the response effort, CCTV reported. But it said the likelihood of a complete breach is “relatively low.”