The death toll from the flash floods and mudslides along the Nepal–China border has passed 1,300, and more than 5,500 people are recorded as missing. That is the position nine days after a glacier collapsed high in the Himalaya and sent water, rock and ice down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems.

Both numbers have moved a long way. On 1 September Nepal’s disaster authority had counted 1,003 dead and 3,916 missing. By 2 September the death toll stood at 1,114 in Nepal, with at least 16 dead on the Chinese side reported by state broadcaster CCTV, and roughly 4,500 unaccounted for across the border. Nearly 12,000 people have been rescued in Nepal.

Why the missing figure keeps growing

It is tempting to read a rising missing count as a death toll waiting to be confirmed. Usually it is not, and the reason is administrative rather than hopeful.

A missing list grows as reporting channels open. In the first days after a disaster, the only people who can file a report are those who reach an office that is still functioning. As roads reopen, as phone coverage returns, as relatives arrive from Kathmandu or from abroad, more reports get filed — including reports about people who were never in the flood zone, people already rescued and registered under a different spelling of their name, and people counted twice because two relatives reported them separately.

In most large disasters, the great majority of those on a missing list are eventually found alive. That is not a prediction about this one. It is the base rate, and it is the reason agencies resist merging the two figures into a single headline number.

There is a harder qualification in this case. A large share of the missing are workers from hydropower projects in the affected valleys, and rescuers have been searching tunnels where people are believed to have been trapped. Missing people inside a flooded tunnel are not the same category as a name reported twice on a district list, and the two are currently sitting inside the same total.

The foreign nationals

Nepal’s authority put the number of foreign nationals among the missing at 583 in its 1 September count. Many were on the route to the border crossing at Gyirong, which carries pilgrims towards Mount Kailash in Tibet as well as freight.

This is worth naming for a specific reason. Coverage of a disaster tends to expand when foreign nationals are involved, and then to contract to their stories. The 583 are a small fraction of the total. The people in the valleys below Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading are the disaster.

The half of it nobody can see

China has mobilised around 2,100 rescue workers and allocated at least 220 million yuan, roughly $32.7m, using heavy-lift drones and helicopters to move supplies near the border crossing. The road to Gyirong, wrecked in the flood, has been largely reopened.

Almost everything known about the Chinese side comes from the Chinese state. Al Jazeera has reported that foreign journalists are not permitted into the area, leaving coverage dependent on government and state media accounts. That is not by itself evidence that the figures are wrong. It does mean the toll of 16 on the Chinese side is a number with no independent check behind it, sitting next to a Nepali figure that news organisations, aid agencies and families have been able to test against each other for ten days. Readers should hold the two with different levels of confidence.

The warning question

Reporting this week has raised the question of whether the collapse was foreseeable, with CNN citing a report that warning signs were visible beforehand. This is the question that will define the political aftermath, and it deserves care rather than speed.

The distinction that matters is between hazard and warning. A slope or a glacier can be known to be unstable for years — that is a hazard assessment, and there are many of them across the Himalaya. A warning is different: it requires knowing that something is about to fail, having a way to tell the people below, and having somewhere for them to go. Establishing that the first existed does not establish that the second was possible. Establishing that both existed, and that nothing was done, is a finding about responsibility, and it will take an investigation rather than a news cycle.

What comes next

International assistance has come from the UN, the Red Cross and Red Crescent federation, Australia, India, South Korea, the United States and Canada, with the latter two committing $3.6m each. Set against 1,300 dead, thousands of destroyed homes and a monsoon that has not ended, those are early figures rather than final ones.

The measurable things from here: whether the missing count starts to fall as people are traced, which is the sign that the registration system is working; whether the hydropower tunnels are reached; and whether the debris still sitting in the upper valleys holds through the rest of the rains.

Related from Plain Sight News: how a glacier falls down a mountain, and why it is hard to see coming, and why the figures for this disaster keep differing.

Sources: Anadolu Agency; Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority via CNN; CBC/Associated Press; Al Jazeera; CCTV as reported.