Rescue operations in northern Nepal are being severely hampered by hydropower tunnels packed with floodwater, mud and debris, as authorities attempt to reach more than 600 workers feared trapped underground.
Prime Minister Balendra Shah told parliament that last week’s floods swept huge quantities of soil into tunnels along the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli corridor, leaving rescuers with little room to operate heavy machinery and forcing teams to wait for conditions to stabilise.
Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said the death toll had reached 1,114 by Wednesday, while nearly 4,000 people remained missing and almost 12,000 had been rescued.
Families have begun holding symbolic funerals for relatives whose bodies have not been recovered, while unidentified victims are being buried after DNA samples are collected as morgues struggle with limited capacity. Questions have also emerged over the speed of the tunnel response, with hydropower officials saying specialist technical teams were not brought into some operations until several days after the disaster.
Nepal has meanwhile sought assistance from the UN-backed Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, with Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal describing such support as a “moral liability” rather than charity and arguing that major industrial emitters bear responsibility for compensating vulnerable countries.
Reminds me of Pike River
Catholics have to retrieve the body so it can go to heaven for ever and ever and …
The soul is not a spirit
Two entirely different things
Which I had to explain to my mother once who had been vaccinated with the gramophone needle of Judeo christianity
All souls die
Flesh is corruption
Sin remainneth in flesh
Quite simple really
Nothing goes up that did not come down whose original dwelling place was not in heaven
Although now at the end of this age its going to be a case of going next door
Genesis 1:8 “And ELOHEEM called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
What caused the Pike River foreseeable catastrophe?
DOC not allowing ventilation holes to be drilled from the outside into the inside of the tunnel
What dereliction of duty caused the Cave Creek disaster and resultant obfuscation of the truth fallout?
Heads should have rolled
All brushed under the carpet
Major industrial emitters bear responsibility for what?
For the landslides that create the Nepal landscape since millennia?
Can’t end well, dwelling underneath glaciers and in the way of rockfalls.
It has been five days and there has not been a singe statement on emergency relief assistance from the government in New Zealand. While billions have been squandered on the corporate war in Ukraine and strange and wonderful lawsuits targeting realists, plus supply and demand re the old “covid response”, the silence is deafening. Although “experts’ handily blame ‘climate change’, there was evidence of technological failure or misjudgement, validating the claim for UN assistance. This should be a case of global response which has nothing to do with the attribution of blame