RASUWA: Distraught families gave DNA samples in the search for missing relatives as others held symbolic funerals on Wednesday, a week after deadly flash floods swept away villages and homes in Nepal’s fragile Himalayan region.
Rescue teams have recovered more than 1,200 bodies, and nearly 4,800 people are missing, after the gigantic wave of freezing water, rocks and debris triggered by a glacial collapse roared down the ChinaNepal border on August 26.
In Nepal’s high-altitude Rasuwa district the first and hardest hit government official Dhruba Prasad Adhikari said people were confronting an ‘unimaginable disaster’.
‘We have to face the reality: this flood is far bigger than anything we could have thought of,’ said Adhikari, who reached the area af ter a more than 12-hour journey by treacherous, mud-covered roads. In the capital Kathmandu, hundreds queued to give DNA samples, seeking to identify their relatives among hundreds of bodies. With mortuaries overflowing, some of the bodies are already buried.
‘It’s been a week since my father has been out of contact, so now I am here to give a DNA sample,’ Susmita Lo, 21, said, holding her six-year-old nephew, whose father is also missing.
‘At nighttime, he calls for his father, but we have not told him that he is missing. He is too young.’ Others had lost hope and were holding last-rite ceremonies, burning straw effigies in Hindu rituals. ‘We had to do this to set his soul free, so that he is at peace and happy wherever he is,’ said Dolma Newar Tamang, flanked by her sobbing son, at a funeral for her husband.
Nepali rescuers are still seeking survivors, including by digging through packed sludge that has entombed multiple tunnels of hydropower plants. So far, rescuers have recovered only bodies from tunnels, but teams were still digging, drilling and blasting through debris.
Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said he still hoped some of the missing could be alive. ‘Miracles do happen,’ he said. ‘At this point, I do not want to completely give up hope.’-AFP