At least 17,000 children have been affected by the flash floods that tore through the Nepali districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading on 26 August, according to humanitarian agencies reporting through the UN’s ReliefWeb platform. The same reporting puts the estimated death toll at around 332.

Readers who followed our earlier coverage will notice that figure does not match the one we published a day ago, which put the toll across Nepal and Tibet at close to 700 with more than 3,000 people unaccounted for. Both numbers are current. Neither is wrong. This piece is partly about why.

Why the two figures differ

The lower figure counts confirmed deaths in three named Nepali districts. The higher one spans both sides of the border, Nepal and the Tibetan side, and includes deaths recorded outside those three districts. A cross-border total and a district total are answers to different questions.

There is a second difference underneath that one. Humanitarian agencies compiling operational figures generally count deaths that a responder or a local authority has recorded. Broader tallies often incorporate provincial or national government statements, which may include people presumed dead. Neither approach is dishonest. They are built for different purposes: one to plan a response, the other to describe an event.

This is the pattern we set out in our explainer on why disaster death tolls never agree, and this event is a clean example of it. The responsible thing is to publish both, say which is which, and expect the figures to converge slowly over weeks rather than days.

The 17,000

The children’s figure is a different kind of number again, and worth explaining because it is easy to misread. “Affected” does not mean injured or orphaned. In humanitarian reporting it means living in a household or community directly hit by the event — homes damaged or destroyed, water supplies contaminated, schools closed, families displaced.

Agencies use it because it is the number that determines what has to be delivered. Seventeen thousand children in flood-hit districts implies a specific set of requirements: clean water and sanitation to prevent waterborne disease, temporary learning spaces, nutrition support for the youngest, and identification of children separated from their families. Those are the things that stop a flood’s secondary death toll from exceeding its immediate one, which in South Asian flooding it often does.

The three districts

Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading sit north and north-west of Kathmandu, in the middle hills running up toward the Tibetan border. They are steep, sparsely roaded, and the settlements sit on valley floors and terraced slopes.

That geography explains both the speed of the flooding and the difficulty of the response. Water moving down a narrow Himalayan valley arrives in minutes, not hours. And when the road is the valley floor, the flood takes the road with it — which is why assessment teams in this kind of terrain routinely take a week to reach the worst-hit settlements, and why early figures from remote districts almost always understate.

What has not changed

The lake that formed above the valley and then drained has been the focus of most coverage. The debris it sat behind is still in place, and the monsoon has not finished. The immediate risk in these districts is not the original flood but a second one, and the people most exposed to it are the families now sheltering in the same valleys because there is nowhere else.

Expect the toll to keep moving. Expect the figures from different sources to keep disagreeing. Neither is a sign that anyone is being misled.

Related: The Lake Has Emptied. The Danger Has Not.

Sources

Figures for children affected and district-level deaths from humanitarian agency reporting published via ReliefWeb (UN OCHA).