Nepal observed a National Day of Mourning on Monday, 13 days after devastating floods killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal and Tibet and left around 5,000 others missing, including foreigners, according to the country’s disaster management agency. Flags were lowered to half-staff at government offices as grieving families concluded traditional mourning rituals for those lost in the 26 August disaster.
In predominantly Hindu Nepal, mourning periods traditionally last 13 days, during which close relatives remain at home while family and friends visit to pay their respects, culminating in rituals held on the final day to pray for the souls of the deceased.
With many bodies never recovered, several families whose relatives remain missing carried out symbolic funerals, allowing them to perform cremation — a central Hindu rite — and find a measure of spiritual closure despite the absence of their loved ones’ remains.
The government had formally designated Monday as a day of mourning, ordering flags at official buildings to be flown at half-mast. Even as the mourning rituals concluded, search operations for the missing continued, though some relatives protested that the authorities’ response had fallen short.
In Kathmandu, families gathered outside the offices of the prime minister and senior government ministries to demand a faster search and rescue effort for hundreds of people who had been working at hydropower plants when they were swept away by the surging Bhotekhoshi River or buried beneath debris.
Sumana Shrestha stood among the demonstrators holding a poster bearing a photograph of her 55-year-old husband, a consulting geologist who has not been heard from since the day of the flood. He had told her he would return home after finishing his shift at the project office of the Trishuli hydropower plant, a two-and-a-half-storey building that was completely buried by debris in the disaster.
“We are here because we have not heard of any rescue attempt on this project, but it has been 13 days already,” she said. “The only thing we have been able to do is pray to God and hope for a miracle.”
Another demonstrator, Mahesh Prasad Shrestha, held up a photograph of his brother, 52-year-old engineer Niraj Shrestha, who had worked at the same site. He said the authorities had sent only a small excavator by helicopter on the sixth or seventh day after the disaster, arguing: “They should have ordered big helicopters from places like China or India to fly in equipment.”
Rescue operations remain concentrated on 12 hydropower projects, where about 900 workers are unaccounted for and roughly 500 are believed to be trapped inside various tunnels, according to authorities.
Specialist rescue teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States have been working through debris, damaged structures and tunnels at the affected sites. Two Nepalese workers were pulled from one of the plants alive on Friday, and rescuers freed a Chinese national from the same facility the following day.
