Nepal is holding a national day of mourning to remember more than 1,300 people who died in last month’s catastrophic floods. Government offices in Nepal and missions abroad are flying the national flag at half-mast on Monday, the 13th day since the floods, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement. In the Hindu tradition, it is the final day of the mourning period, during which close family members stay at home and relatives visit to pay their respects. On the final day, rituals are held to pray for those who died.
The government has not planned any wider events for this day of mourning because search teams are still looking for survivors and resources are limited. “There are no government programmes organised as the rescue and search operation is still going on in the flood-hit areas,” Phanindra Paudel of the National Emergency Operation Center (NEOC) told the Reuters news agency. A huge wall of mud and rock, triggered by a glacier breaking off, collapsed into a river on the Himalayan border of Nepal and China’s Tibet region on August 26, causing flooding that killed at least 1,380 people and left more than 5,500 missing. In recent days, search teams in Nepal have rescued four people, including a Chinese national who was pulled from a tunnel at a hydropower site on Saturday. The others rescued were two hydropower workers from another tunnel on Friday, as well as a Nepali woman pulled out from her buried house on Saturday.
President Ram Chandra Paudel, the ceremonial head of state, is touring flood-hit areas on Monday and will survey damage caused by the disaster, his aide said. In Kathmandu, family members gathered near the offices of the prime minister and key ministries to demand the speeding up of the search for the hundreds of people who were working on hydropower projects and were either swept away by the rushing Bhotekoshi River or buried by the debris. Sumana Shrestha stood with her family members holding a poster with the photo of her 55-year-old husband, who has not been heard from since the day of the flood. Her husband, a consulting geologist, was supposed to return home after his shift at the project office for the Trishuli hydropower plant on the day of the flood.
The two-and-a-half-storey office was buried by debris. “We are here because we have not heard of any rescue attempt on this project, but it has been 13 days already,” she said. “The only thing we have been able to do is pray to God and hope for a miracle.” Another protester, Mahesh Prasad Shrestha, held a photograph of his brother Niraj Shrestha, a 52-year-old engineer who worked at the same site. He said authorities sent only a small excavator by helicopter on the sixth or seventh day after the disaster, adding: “They should have ordered big helicopters from places like China or India to fly in equipment.” Rescue efforts have focused on 12 hydropower projects, where about 900 workers are missing and roughly 500 are believed to be trapped in various tunnels, authorities said. Specialised rescue teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States have been searching through debris, damaged structures and tunnels at the projects.
