Rasuwa Flood 2026: How to Trace Someone Missing, and What Happened

On the morning of Wednesday 26 August 2026 a wall of water came down the Bhote Koshi from the Chinese side and destroyed the border crossing at Rasuwagadhi, the settlement at Timure, and parts of Syabrubesi. Hundreds of people are unaccounted for, and most of them are foreign nationals.

I am writing this because our own team was standing at Timure the afternoon before it happened. We were the last group to fly out of there. Since then I have been answering the same questions by phone and message all day, from people trying to find someone, and the answers are scattered across a dozen places or not written down anywhere at all.

So this is everything I have, in one place. There is nothing to book at the bottom of this page. It is what I would want to read if I were the one making the calls.

The numbers to call

These were correct on the morning of Thursday 28 August 2026. In an emergency this fast, lines change. If one does not answer, go to the organisation's own website rather than assuming it is dead.

If you are calling from outside Nepal

Nepal's emergency numbers are short codes, and short codes generally do not work from a foreign phone. The number below does work internationally, and it is the one to start with.

Nepal Tourism Board, Tourist Service Centre, Bhrikutimandap, Kathmandu
Telephone +977 1 4256909
Email [email protected]
Website ntb.gov.np

The Tourism Board is the body compiling the register of foreign nationals specifically. Those details are printed on their own official notice, which is where I have taken them from rather than from a news report.

The disaster hotline inside Nepal, and an important correction

Dial 1234.

If you search for Nepal's disaster hotline you will very likely be given 1149. That number has been replaced. The Home Ministry moved the national disaster hotline to 1234 in July 2026, weeks before this happened, and a great many pages have not caught up. If somebody has given you 1149, they are working from old information.

1234 is worth understanding properly, because of how it routes. Calls from Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur are answered by the National Emergency Operation Centre at Singha Durbar. Calls from the other 74 districts are routed automatically to that district's own emergency operation centre.

That matters more than it sounds. It means a call placed from inside Nepal reaches the Rasuwa district operation room directly, and the district office is the one holding the ground record. If you have anybody at all in Nepal who can dial for you, that is the call to ask them to make.

Other numbers inside Nepal

• 100 Nepal Police, including missing persons
• 1144 Tourist Police
• 102 Ambulance
• 103 Traffic Police, for road and highway conditions

If the person you are looking for is an Indian national

The Embassy of India in Kathmandu has opened three lines, and they take messages on WhatsApp as well as calls:

• +977 985 131 6807
• +977 970 910 7500
• +977 981 032 6117

Several Indian state governments have also opened their own desks. A state desk is often faster than the national line, because the person answering has the local records in front of them. Look for your own state's disaster management authority.

If the person is any other nationality

Contact your embassy or consulate in Kathmandu. Consulates are receiving lists and confirming names one at a time, and in this incident that process has already moved a large number of people from the missing column to the safe column. Italian authorities alone re-established contact with well over a hundred of their nationals who had been unaccounted for.

Which nationalities are on the official register

The Nepal Tourism Board issued a signed record of Nepali and foreign nationals missing in the Rasuwa flood, dated Thursday 27 August 2026, at 12:00. I am reproducing the country breakdown because it answers a question I keep being asked, which is whether a particular country is even being tracked.

If your country is on this list, your nationals are on the official Nepali register and your embassy in Kathmandu should already be engaged. That is the practical use of it.

Country	Persons	Country	Persons
India	178	Latvia	6
Nepal	127	South Africa	6
USA	65	Japan	5
Ukraine	53	New Zealand	5
Malaysia	51	France	4
Australia	35	Belgium	3
United Kingdom	33	Spain	3
Canada	25	Italy	2
Singapore	9	Ireland	2
Germany	8	Kazakhstan	2
Russia	8	Netherlands	2
Portugal	2	Belarus, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Lithuania, Philippines, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland	1 each

Thirty three nationalities. 644 people on that record.

Two honest notes about it. First, it is a register of people reported unaccounted for, not a death toll, and it is not the same thing as a list of the lost. Second, it was a snapshot at midday on the 27th, and rescues have been reported separately by other agencies since, so the true number of people still unaccounted for is lower than 644 and falling. Do not read that table as a casualty figure. It is not one.

Why someone can be missing and not be on that register

The Tourism Board has been open about how the record is built. The figures are compiled from what trekking and travel companies have submitted, and they are still being cross-checked against agencies, guides, local authorities and the security forces. That is the honest state of it, and it has a consequence I have not seen written down anywhere.

If the person you are looking for booked through a company, that company has very probably reported them. If they did not, they may not be on the register at all. Somebody travelling independently. Somebody who hired a guide privately rather than through an agency. Somebody who changed plans and went north on their own. A driver, a porter, a trader at the crossing. None of those people has a company filing on their behalf.

So a name not appearing is not reassurance. It can mean the person is safe. It can equally mean nobody has entered them yet. Those two look identical from the outside, and I would not want you reading the first when it is the second.

If you think someone may have fallen through it, the answer is to get them entered rather than to wait. Ring the Tourism Board on the number at the top of this page if they are a foreign national, and your embassy in Kathmandu as well. If they are Nepali, the route is the one in the next section, and it starts at the ward office.

Why I am not publishing the names

I have been given a copy of the detailed register, by a family who was affected. I am not putting it on this page, and I want to say plainly why, because I would rather you knew it existed than wondered what I was holding back.

It carries a passport number and a date of birth against every name on it. It is preliminary by the Tourism Board's own account and is still being corrected. And it is hundreds of other families' information, not mine to publish, and not one of them has been asked. The Tourism Board itself has released the country totals and has not released the names, and I do not think it is my place to make that decision for them.

What I can do is this. If you are looking for somebody, send me the name and I will tell you honestly whether I can see it, and then point you at the office that can actually confirm it either way. That is worth more than a list on a website, which would be out of date the day somebody is found alive.

If the person you are looking for is Nepali

Most of what is written about this flood, including most of this page so far, is aimed at foreign families. I want to correct that, because the people I am personally hearing about are not tourists.

The crossing at Timure runs on local labour. Drivers, porters, freight handlers, shopkeepers, kitchen staff, construction and hydropower workers. A great many of them are not from Rasuwa at all. They come down from the hill villages for the season, they work the border, and they go home. Whole clusters of men from one ward will be at that crossing in the same week because that is how the work is found.

Here is the part that worries me most, and it is the reason I have added this section. A foreign visitor arrives through an agency, a hotel register and an immigration desk, so when they go missing there is a paper trail and an embassy. A man who walked down from a hill village to load lorries has none of that. He may be known to be missing by everybody in his own village and appear on no official list anywhere.

If that is your situation, the single most useful thing you can do is get the name formally registered, in this order:

• Your own ward office and rural municipality first. They compile the local record and pass it upward. A name that starts here reaches the district.
• The District Administration Office and District Police Office. Dialling 1234 from anywhere in Nepal outside the Kathmandu valley routes you to that district's emergency operation centre.
• Nepal Police on 100 to have the person recorded as missing rather than only as unaccounted for.

A handwritten list circulating in a village, or in a group chat, is not an official record. It is real, and the people on it are real, but nothing follows from it until a name is entered by an office. Registration is what triggers the search, and it is also what later governs relief and compensation for the family. If you are holding such a list, please walk it to the ward office.

I am saying this because I have seen more than one of those lists in the last two days, carrying names of people I know, and I do not believe all of them have reached anybody official yet.

Why the numbers keep changing, and what that means

In the first forty eight hours the reported death toll moved from single figures into the hundreds, and the missing count was given variously as three hundred, seven hundred and fifty, and over a thousand, sometimes by different agencies on the same afternoon.

I am not going to put a death toll in this article, because whatever I write will be out of date by the time you read it. Go to Nepal Police or the government's own BIPAD incident portal for the current record, and to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority for the rescue side.

But I do want to explain why the numbers swing so violently, because I think it is being read the wrong way by people who are frightened.

A missing person in a Nepali border district in the first days after a flood is usually one of four things. They are out of phone contact, which in that valley is entirely normal on an ordinary day. They have walked out to another village and nobody has told the office. They are sitting in a rescue count held by a different agency from the one holding the missing list. Or they have been lost.

The first three resolve, and they resolve steadily across the first week or two. That is why rescue counts and missing counts can both rise on the same day and look like a contradiction. It is not a contradiction. It is two lists being reconciled by hand, slowly, in a place with no working communications and no road.

A name on a missing list on day two is not the same as a name on a missing list on day fourteen. If you are searching, that difference is the most important thing on this page.

Where people actually were

If you are trying to work out where somebody might have been, the geography matters, and it is not obvious from a map.

Timure is the last settlement before the border. It is not somewhere people pass through on the way to somewhere else. It is where you wait. There is a customs and immigration complex, a small market of lodges and shops serving the crossing, a dry port for freight, and a helipad. Groups going into Tibet stop there for paperwork. Groups coming out of Tibet stop there for paperwork. Lorry drivers wait there for clearance, sometimes for days.

So the population at Timure on any given morning is a mixture that appears on no single register. Pilgrims and tourists going in and out of Tibet. Nepali drivers and freight handlers. Customs and immigration staff. Police posted to the border. Workers from the hydropower projects on that same river. Local families who live and trade there.

Syabrubesi, further down the valley, is the road head for the Langtang trek and a normal overnight stop. The crossing itself at Rasuwagadhi sits at the top.

That is why the missing list is so mixed, and why it puts tourists from thirty three countries alongside customs officials, security personnel and hydropower workers. All of those people were inside the same few hundred metres of riverbank, for completely different reasons.

What we saw the day before

Our group came out of Tibet on 25 August. We cleared the border and came down to Timure the same day. We flew out by helicopter from the Timure helipad at about four in the afternoon. We were the last flight out.

The next morning the helipad was gone.

There was nothing to see. That is the part I most want to put in writing, because I think some people are quietly asking themselves whether their family member ignored a warning.

The weather was ordinary. The river was high, as it is every day in late August, and there was nothing about it that would make anybody leave. The market was open. People were waiting for clearance the way they always are. It looked like any other monsoon afternoon at that crossing.

Nobody there did anything wrong. There was no sign to read.

I say that plainly because a flood that arrives with no rain falling locally gives no warning at all to the people standing in front of it. Which brings me to what actually happened.

What caused it

The cause is still under investigation, and I am going to be careful here, because there is a wrong answer circulating that is very easy to arrive at.

If you search this, you will find confident reporting that a glacial lake burst upstream. That reporting is real, but a good deal of it describes a different flood. This same river destroyed this same crossing in July 2025, and that event was investigated and attributed to a glacial lake outburst. Search results conflate the two, and a conclusion from thirteen months ago is being read as this week's finding.

What is established about this one is that there was little or no rainfall at the district headquarters when the surge arrived. The water came from across the border, down a tributary, into the Bhote Koshi. The government has formed a high level team to establish the cause, and that work is under way.

The mechanism that matters is not the trigger, though. It is what happens next in a valley shaped like that one.

Whatever released the water high up, it did not arrive as clean water. It arrived carrying rock, gravel, ice and trees, into a narrow gorge. Material like that does not flow past an obstruction. It piles against it. Somewhere upstream that mass dams the river, water builds behind it for minutes or for hours, then the dam fails and releases the lot in one movement.

That is why the damage looks the way it does. It is why a settlement can be intact at four in the afternoon and gone by morning. And it is why the arrival is so sudden that any warning would need to be minutes ahead of it rather than hours.

What there is still to fear

This is the question I have been asked most, and it deserves a direct answer rather than reassurance.

The first flood is not necessarily the last one. If debris is still holding water back upstream, that blockage can fail again. It can fail days after the original event, in clear weather, with no rain anywhere nearby. This is the single most important thing for anyone currently in that valley to understand, and that includes families who have travelled up there to look for someone.

The alert reaches much further down than the damage does. Warnings on the Bhote Koshi and the Trishuli have extended through Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Gorkha and as far as Chitwan, with settlements at Muglin told to stay alert. If you are downstream of the confluence you are on the same river system, even a long way from Timure.

Access is the constraint on the rescue, not willingness. The road up that valley is cut. The bridge at the crossing is gone. And the helipad that would normally be used to reach Timure was itself destroyed, which is why so much of the early rescue was flown into whatever ground could be found rather than into a proper landing site. That is a large part of why people who are safe have still not been able to make contact, and why the counts move so slowly.

The recovery will be measured in months. I am not guessing at that. In July 2025 the same river took out the same crossing. It took thirteen days to get one way traffic moving on the road. The replacement bridge was not installed until the end of December, and the border did not reopen properly until early 2026. This event is worse than that one.

What we do not know

I would rather write this than pretend the picture is clearer than it is.

We do not know the cause with certainty. We do not know how many people were at Timure that morning, because a border crossing keeps no single register of everyone standing in it. We do not know whether the upstream blockage has cleared. And we do not know how many of the people currently listed as missing are simply out of contact, although on the evidence of the last two days it is a meaningful share of them.

Anyone giving you a confident total right now is guessing.

If you want to ask us something

We are a trekking company in Kathmandu, not an authority, and I want to be honest about the limits of that. We cannot search for anybody. We have no access to any official list beyond the public ones above.

What we do have is people in Kathmandu, contacts in that district, and a team that was standing at that crossing the day before it went. If you are abroad, cannot get through to an office in Nepal, and simply need somebody here to make a call in Nepali and tell you honestly what they were told, write to us and we will try. We will not charge anyone for that, and we will not pretend to know something we do not.

Write to [email protected].

To the families waiting: a name on a list this week does not mean what you are afraid it means. People are still being found.