Five days after the glacier collapse on the Nepal–Tibet border, the confirmed death toll across Nepal and China is approaching 700, with more than 3,000 people still unaccounted for. Nepali authorities put their own count at 626 dead on Saturday.

The lake that formed behind the debris at the head of the valley, and which halted search work near the border earlier in the week, has drained. That removes the immediate danger of a second surge. It does not remove the danger.

Why an empty lake is still a problem

The blockage that held the water is still there, and so is everything the flood left behind: loose rock, mud and shattered slope material sitting in a valley that has been stripped of the vegetation that used to hold it.

Rain falling on that material does not behave the way rain falling on an intact hillside does. It runs off faster, carries more with it, and can remobilise debris that has not yet settled. This is why the weeks after a flood of this kind carry their own risk, and why forecasters watching the monsoon are as important to the response now as the search teams are.

A debris dam can also refill. Nothing about it draining once guarantees it stays drained.

The missing figure has stopped moving in one direction

We have made this point twice this week and it still holds: the missing are not a second death toll waiting to be confirmed. The list is built from relatives’ reports, it contains duplicates, and in comparable Himalayan disasters a substantial share of those on it were later found alive.

What has changed is the rate. In the first days the number rose steeply as reports came in; it has now largely stabilised, which usually means the reporting phase is finishing and the reconciliation phase is beginning. That reconciliation — matching names across districts, shelters and hospitals — is slow, unglamorous work, and it is what turns a figure of 3,000 into an accurate account of who died and who did not.

Expect the confirmed dead to keep rising and the missing to fall, without the two numbers meeting in the middle.

What the response looks like now

The emphasis has shifted from rescue to keeping survivors alive through the coming weeks: shelter for people whose houses are full of mud, clean water in a valley where the water system is buried, and preventing the disease outbreaks that follow when sanitation fails in crowded temporary accommodation.

The physical obstacles have not changed. Nineteen bridges destroyed, around 40 kilometres of damaged road, weather that grounds helicopters, and a destroyed border crossing that was the obvious staging point for anything moving between the two countries.

The argument that has started

A disaster of this scale in the Himalaya reliably produces a debate about responsibility, and it has begun. One position, put forcefully this week by climate campaigners and some researchers, is that the countries suffering these events contributed least to the warming that is destabilising high mountain terrain, and that this is a matter of injustice rather than misfortune.

The counter-position, held by scientists who study slope failure, is not that warming is irrelevant but that attributing any single collapse to it requires evidence that does not yet exist, and that treating attribution as settled weakens the case rather than strengthening it.

Both can be true at once: the trend can be real and this event’s cause still unestablished. That is an uncomfortable place for a public argument to sit, which is why it rarely stays there.

Earlier coverage: survivors reaching safety and how a glacier falls down a mountain.

Sources

Nepal Police; Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority; UPI; Anadolu Agency; CNN; Chinese state media reports from Gyirong county.