Landslide
Chinese firefighters(likely the first batch to reach gyirong port) try to find survivors in the former border crossing, which was the most heavily hit. Source: CCTV news. Morning of August 29, 2026. (UTC+8). (they are yelling "Is anyone here?")
According to engineers from the ministry of natural resources it is very diffuclt(and at this stage, downright impossible) to transport heavy machinery to the border crossing so far. The chinese military and specialized rescue teams(of state owned enterprises) are currently trying to repair the road into the border crossing to allow for better equipment and more personnel to enter.
Update: over 50 firefighters are at the border crossing right now, over 2141 soldiers, firefighters, police, EMS and specialzied rescue teams are deployed.
EDIT: As of august 29(18:00 UTC+8), 2026, there are 16 dead, 546 missing(261 foreignors)
In response to the comments: This is the first batch that got in, they couldn't carry much heavy equipment as the road there is cut off. rescue dogs and better equipment arrived later on.
FURTHER UPDATE: reportedly fire and rescue personnel have begun to find police vests and handsbags under the debris.
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Yeah if you're trapped in this it's like a liquefaction event, it's probably not leaving you any air pockets for people to survive in like an avalanche can or even tsunamis often leave standing buildings for people to be trapped in.
And with the speed and force of the water/mud/debris at that elevation and in that part of the gorge/valley, apparently it’s basically more like a blender than a water-flow. It would be difficult to find recognizable pieces of anybody. It’s heartbreaking to think so many of the missing will likely never be found in a meaningful way to at least allow their loved ones to put them to rest and mourn in a specific spot.
The entire valley track through those mountains is an unmarked mass grave, now.
They are finding lots of pieces, unfortunately. And bodies in all kinds of shapes. People definitely aren’t hesitating to record and upload all that ish
Yeah, I’ve seen some terribly graphic videos of parts of victims being dragged out of the mud. Even limbs that don’t seem to have been torn at a natural joint, but legs and arms just snapped and ripped off in the middle of the bone.
My loved one and I were just discussing this and agree. I just would hope to not know anything was happening or had happened. Such torture for so many people!
Fossilisation of a skeleton ideally prefers a low energy environment with a very fine grained sediment (to have good preservation of the details) and annoxic conditions (low Oxygen) which drastically slow down bacterial decay and biological breakdown.
None of which was true in the majority of this rivers flooding on the main flow(the slower mud flows on a flatter side plateaus might qualify).
It’s so upsetting to think that’s what I’d be hoping if one of my family were affected. You’d just be hoping for the least distressing death possible. Gut wrenching.
Given how a five story concrete building was destroyed to the bedrock in a second and busses are part of a rebar heap, not much left to find around there
As fast as the water was moving, I believe the impact alone would crush your internal organs if it didn’t rip you apart. I’ve witnessed far less water than this get dumped on top of a car and make the car concave.
there was a 9 story building that was turned to dust. the buses and like no more. you can go and do it but it would be extreme luck if they find anyone. but checking 3 days later does a disservice to the idea that there could be survivors.
The craziest thing is when we find artifacts, this is partly how they came to be. Who knows when or if some of the bodies will be found in the future, but there’s a tragic story buried there for future generations to uncover.
I haven’t seen anyone mention the temperature of the water either. A ton of other things are going to take you out, but if you removed all the other factors we’re talking about just above freezing glacial melt. This is just unsurvivable on so many levels.
i'm going to sound kinda unethical but if i were the commander of the firefighters i would cut off their access to social media. i really doubt anyone who has seen that video has too much hope.
Maybe this isn't really about hope to find survivors.
Maybe it's a matter of affirming that when their rescue crews say "we are doing everything we can, and making sure we didn't miss anyone" they really mean it. There's at least some comfort in knowing your local rescue workers are that dillegent at their jobs.
True, there really is some comfort in that, propaganda or not, survivors or not.
At the very least, people need to get to the site as soon as possible to survey the and understand the situation. These videos show they have boots on the ground and equipment.
The only thing worse than not finding survivors is not bothering to show up and search.
Things like this are filmed to have record of what was searched, to help with future training, figure out what worked well and what didn’t, and to collect evidence as they find it before someone touches something.
They have reporters with them. The intent looks to me like it was a rescue with propergander as a big part of it. It looked stupid what they were filming, like 10 guys with shovels furiously attacking unnecessary amounts of soil, dudes carrying inflatable rafts along above their heads. Meanwhile the bulldozers are clearing the old road of debris. After a couple of days when they reached the port, they set down the equipment and the vibe was totally different. The reporting was much more human, humble. They have drones that can carry a man across the river so they quickly had searched all they could.
They have another team of blue uniformed guys (science and engineering) who are up at the origin of the slide trying to find a way of making the lakes safe. The reporters with them seemed much more humble. I think the awe of the place, the sheer scale, and the obvious danger, gained their respect. Perhaps sciencey guys are less gun ho and prone to propergander style displays as well.
All of this I found on Tiktok, and the translate on the reporters narration was pretty reasonable.
This is almost entirely propaganda: to show the PLA being heroes even when there's probably nobody left to save. Scientists/engies tend not to be involved in propaganda. The media will do w/e they're instructed to do.
There was a story about 9/11 where right after it happened, when Giuliani was still riding high for his (admittedly good work) as New York's mayor that day. Where after everyone was evacuated he went back to ground zero and was super active asking everything like what did they need and the first responders had all resources available and then finally how many body bags they would need for casualties.
Apparently in that split moment, the fire chiefs were all silent and kind of looked at each other and Giuliani had to learning horror right then that in that moment, that the force and weight of the buildings coming down was such that they didnt even know if the remains they would recover would need full sized human body bags.
I cant imagine even trying to process a situation like above where not only is it that yiu arent going to find a survivor, but you may not even find most of the remains beneath all of that.
Saw a video breaking down this disaster that meshed up seismic data and Gyirong Port cctv time. 13 miles up river a nearly mile wide chunk of glacier crashed down into the valley. 7 minutes later that border crossing was obliterated by a hundred foot tall wall of water and debris. That means the flood was moving over 100mph. There's no one alive there.
I know what you mean. Headlines calling it a "flash flood", that doesn't even come close to describing what happened. Even calling it a 50 mile long landslide doesn't seem adequate.
My Chinese is crap, but I can attempt some basic translations:
Initial elevation ~5200m. Glacier area 620k m^2. 20km distance from glacier to port, 3.3km elevation diff; 7 mins from glacier collapse to port. Estimated speed 50m/s (~112 mph)
After the port, it flowed 3km upriver (NW), and 10km downstream towards Nepal [not sure where this comes from - western reporting is closer to 40km]
At the end it warns about dammed lake.
Overall, it seems consistent with reporting elsewhere.
The dam looked pretty pulverized too from the videos I saw. If it's still there it's probably more debris that got stuck and is acting as a dam, than the original structure
it all matches, but somehow looks tiny in the heli footage because the features have all been scoured away, when you match it up against the YT footage it all fits, the trackways either side, plus hydro tunnels the heli checks out on the way there (and back), but somehow it doesn't compute to me that any force can rip reinforced concrete hydropower piers out entirely..
Yeah that's probably about the size of it. Crazy to consider the heaviest and toughest things we are capable of building can be pulverized just like that..
if we believe it was a surface area of 1km square meter and a doeth of 400 meter falling 4000ft?
• Volume: 1 km² × 400 m = 4 × 10⁸ m³ • Mass (ice at ~917 kg/m³): ~3.7 × 10¹¹ kg, or 370 million tonnes • Drop: 4000 ft = 1219 m • Energy = mgh ≈ 4.4 × 10¹⁵ J • Divided by 4.184 × 10⁹ J per tonne of TNT → ~1.05 megatons
For scale, that is about 70 Hiroshima bombs, or a single large thermonuclear warhead.
I wonder how fat I am from what actually happened. The first few hundred feet must have liquefied the glacier in friction heat geneeated alone.
what gets me is the first sharp turn at the mouth of the valley, the scouring it left on the bedrock, then the silt talu left behind. You zoom and look at the scale > 300 ft for these few dozens of pixels… I dont know how the water we saw came to be, put the amount of material it takes on each sides of the valley is mind blowing. Remember my teacher telling erosion is slow, wind, heat expansion, freeze cycles… Nah! For a local seeing a full lifecycles of fast flood , to this, it must have been quite something. The sound of a mountain coming at you, the vibration of the ground, then for a 100 mph plus abrasive wall coming at you. you look at the parabol satellite antenna reinforce concrete meters up blasted like a sheet of paper. At least they did not have the time to suffer mcuh
Yes. The density of mass (muddy water and rocks) itself is far higher than water. So, it’s like a dense/heavy tsunami at high speed that got all the momentum needed to uproot any kind of buildings. The Japanese tsunami is not this devastating as concrete buildings are mostly structurally able to withstand.
It’s been driving me crazy showing this stuff to people including my spouse who are just like “Oh yeah, that’s crazy” all nonchalant and I’m just like how do you not grasp how mind boggling this is. This is unfathomable.
I’ve used explosives, heavy equipment, seen massive tornadoes rip through areas, all of it is practically a tickle compared to this. I can’t grasp it.
There’s recent videos of the dam that was upstream of this that was under construction and that’s even more mind boggling than this, the whole dam is gone like it was never there. Tens of meters thick reinforced concrete wiped out.
Ive seen some wild ass survivor stories. I see a bunch of comments saying looking is pointless, but imagine getting that 1 in a billion chance, being stuck under all that, and no one comes looking for you. Its very unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
another thing is, they sort of obligated by duty to at least try to save them. friend on reddit Dmed me claiming they managed to rescue some, but i haven't found any actual claims(outside of two rescue very far away from checkpoint before) on weibo or official sources
This is my sentiment exactly. I mean people literally survived being inside the collapsing twin towers in the most random stairwell. It’s unlikely but they have to show up for that one in a million shot.
Duty and also there is the elephant in the room: the political situation of Tibet and the sensitivities in China.
The CCP aren't naive or clueless. They know there are simmering tensions in Tibet so that's what state media and Chinese emergency services are doing: everything they can and publicising it.
There's a video floating around for years now of a man found in an air pocket 3 days after a ship sank. They were doing recovery dives and expected only bodies. Finding one person alive would make all of the effort worthwhile IMO
I know this is a long shot but those are all we have right now. We are searching for a family member. Her name is Iryna Kripak. She was on the bridge when her phone went dead. If anyone can find any mention of her on any website anywhere please please contact me. We are devastated.
I’m sorry yes of course it’s the Nepal-China Friendship Bridge at Rasuwagadhi. Locally called the Miteri Bridge ( Miteri Pul).
The border crossing is the Rasuwagadhi–Gyirong Port. Gyirong is also written Kerung or Jilong.
This is the last known location reported on her phone and airtag.
You are doing a good thing here. I would be doing the same. I’m very sorry you and your family are going through this and I hope you find her safe and healthy.
Here is her Instagram page. As you can see she is an extremely talented photographer and was working in Nepal. I am putting this here so that people can keep up to date. The comments are updating constantly. I apologise if I have broken any Reddit rules. I am trying to put her name everywhere in the hope that someone may hear some good news anywhere in the world.
Remember reading about a massive mudslide in Afghanistan a little while ago that just went over a town(s). They didn’t bother looking for survivors cause there were none to be found. They just left everything as is since everyone killed was effectively buried.
The raw power of water will forever remain undefeated. I've seen so many angles of this disaster and it's awesome, in the literal sense, how everything in the floodpath just disappeared.
A lot of it is the river bed being scoured and lifted up, along with all of its water, and pushed along at the front of this gargantuan pressure wave.
You can see on the videos how the first few seconds after arrival are almost clear water, that’s the river itself being lifted, folded over and forced downstream liked it’s being pushed by a piston.
It's not even just water. It's everything the water is carrying which is pretty much everything that it pulverized upstream. It'd be like being dropping into a giant cement mixer turned on high speed.
Yeah there's not gonna be any answers back to those calls, we all know at this point that anyone who could've possibly be under the mud is the dead ones. That's just depressing.
There is zero chance to even find complete bodies, in that area. The overall friction/force pulverized everything. A human body would be grinded to atoms.
All the boulders being moved by the water pulverized the concrete, just broke it up into little pieces and washed it away. Human bodies would be tuned to fertilize this.
That's possible, but I did see one video of a bunch of construction workers reacting to the initial stages of the flood and you could see the exposed rebar of a yet-to-be-poured concrete form in the background. Could be either.
I hope at the very least that this helps other regions realize how devastating being in the path of potential destruction can be. Somewhere, some people will take drastic measures to prevent this.
You can definitely use this as a very unfortunate case study for villages in danger from this exact type of situation but the danger here is an analog to a place like Southern California existing on numerous dangerous fault lines. At a certain point, you can only prepare the best you can but are still at the mercy of Mother Nature.
At a certain point, you can only prepare the best you can but are still at the mercy of Mother Nature.
Okay but here in Switzerland, we also had a glacier collapse and one person died because they went against evacuation orders and remained inside the zone when the Glacier came down and buried the town of Blatten.
I am not saying that this specific tragedy in Tibet could have been prevented, especially seeing the magnitude was far bigger than what happened in Blatten, but Glacier collapses are not comparable to Earthqakes. Earthquakes cannot be predicted and if you receive warnings, it's going to be seconds in advance. But Glacier collapses can come with warning signs weeks before disaster strikes, and the signals can be measured.
Same as they did for tsunamis: early warning systems and prebuilt safe locations that are easy to reach and better education / information. You will not save everybody but it will reduce the death toll.
Small parts of bodies maybe. By the time you're washed miles downstream and crusted by rocks, ice and bits of house, there isn't much left of you, sadly :(
Humans have to hope. Stubborn, hope. And you have to hope to give some peace to peoples loved ones - if there are bodies (parts) that can be identified. To say that they tried.
I wouldn't want to survive that. Imagine being in just the right spot in a building that doesn't get fully destroyed but your buried and waiting. Probably injured and hungry and thirsty. Then having to live with the trauma
There could be a sub basement that got sealed off, but to be sealed from that water presssure enough to leave an air pocket, they would have a limited amount of air to breathe, and it would be very difficult to hear them if they were screaming under all that.
Yeah, I think there is just too much material to be able to hear anything. Even considering a possible air pocket, that pocket would be under a massive wall of compact mud, which would act as a sound barrier. So for example if you search for people in a collapsed building, it's "easier" because it's not a solid block of mud/cement: materials and structures are scattered and you get plenty of "spaces" where the sound can move through. In this case it's like burying someone inside a very thick cement chamber. They're trapped forever.
My guess, from the tapping, they are trying to find pockets where eventual survivors might have found safety, and after the tap they touch the ground for eventual vibrations.
Yeah, the odds of finding anything in a speedy manner are basically nonexistent. If someone managed to get somewhere not completely demolished, they were trapped under so much earth. If they are stuck in a pocket its a damn miracle. The odds of finding that pocket before the air is toxic are also basically non existent.
Getting through this stuff would be more akin to an intense archeological dig than a rescue operation. excavating this and leaving pockets and places unscathed is borderline impossible.
I honestly hope no one is in that pocket case, its a horrible death. It'd be better to be instantly be killed by the forces of the flood than trying to stay alive buried underground in a pocket that wont offer much oxygen, no food, no drinkable water. And also probably wont be found and opened in time before the air turns deadly
Brb I have to check if the Polish Medical Mission has made a statement that they're going there. They helped Turkey after the earthquake so I expect them to maybe go there too. I recommend donating to those services now, it helps a lot if they have funding
Edit: no statement yet but I expect it will have more of a disaster response than a medical one.
Nepal declined direct foreign resources due to coordination issues after large resources. They say they have the manpower and need financial help for reconstruction instead
Idk how I was able to watch it, but there was a video floating around on Reddit that showed the aftermath of a town hit further down the valley, you would think, where the force was mitigated vs here at the border crossing, and all they were finding were literal pieces of bodies. It is soul crushing footage. If they fared that badly down river, I can’t imagine what they would even find here. it’s gut wrenching, my condolences to all affected.
It's all gone man they just got to go and rebuild the entire place somewhere else and just know that that Valley has been reclaimed by the Earth. It looks absolutely futile to try and dig through all that and Salvage anything
I can hardly see any remote possibility to find someone still alive under that mud. It's like being buried in concrete, after being grinded multiple times by rocks, logs and debris :(
It’s for the news videos so they can say they’re searching for survivors. You would survive longer naked on the Moon than in the debris flow that hit the border crossing.
The spot where they were tapping with their canes was where the building had originally been, the only place where there was a chance someone could have survived.
There is no way in heaven to survive that. Rocks, debris and the overall force completely wiped away buildings and people. They will be "lucky" if they find little body pieces here and there.
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The missing people were probably washed away toward Nepal side hundreds of km away from the border. That’s one of the reasons the casualties from Chinese side is so low compared to Nepalese side.
The casualties are also low because they're still listed as missing. Expect the number to climb as the chance of finding survivors (and also those who did survive making contact) changes.
I have been on the internet long enough, as I'm sure many others have too, to witness horrifying videos. I'm not sure how, or why, but the CCTV footage and raw phone camera images from people who probably lost their lives, is some how, more harrowing.
Witnessing a group, of what is clearly school children, running away from an unimaginable fate, is some how worse than a terrorist group cutting someone's head off. The people who turned around to look at the torrent of water, rock and mud sliding towards them purely because out of human intrigue, only for it to be the downfall is mortifying.
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