State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said Monday that 13 Americans had made it to safety in Nepal and that 80 Americans were still missing as of 9 a.m. Monday morning. The State Department, he said, had “activated $3.6 million in humanitarian assistance, including life-saving food assistance.” He added that the United States had “increased consular assistance in this area to ensure that we can provide 24/7 support to Americans in need from our embassies in Beijing and Kathmandu.” In Nepal, rescuers continue to struggle to reach devastated communities days after massive flooding from a glacier collapse near the country’s northern border with China’s Tibet region on Wednesday. Ferrin Cole, chief operating officer of Crisis Response International, a South Carolina-based aid organization, described the disaster as “overwhelming” and told NBC News on Sunday that “the flood that came down from that mountain just wiped out the cities.” “We’re going to act as quickly as we can to get people the help they need,” he said. The disaster has affected more than 90,000 people, according to the Nepal Red Cross. The country’s morgues have been overwhelmed, and in Chitwan district, which is 125 miles from the disaster zone, authorities dug hundreds of graves in a forest in Devghat for bodies washed downstream from the flood-hit Rasuwa region. option,” Ganesh Aryal, district director of Chitwan, told Reuters. “Our concern was the risk to public health posed by the rapid decomposition of the bodies.” “More than half” of the bodies recovered there were “beyond recognition,” he added. Elsewhere, rescue teams were trying to reach the 933 workers believed to be trapped at 11 hydropower projects in the worst-affected districts of Rasuwa and Nuwakot. Images and videos shared by Rescuers showed earth-moving equipment digging and shoveling mud and rocks under lights in the dead of night in an attempt to find the workers, many of whom were thought to be in about half a dozen tunnels. The Nepalese military told The Associated Press that search and rescue teams were using controlled explosions, excavators and searchlights to clear the water. It is unclear to what extent there is overlap between China’s and Nepal’s missing person counts. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV attributed the disaster to “glacial instability resulting from the long-term effects of climate warming” in a report on Sunday. “It occurred suddenly, with a large peak flow, high speed, severe destructive force and a wide impact area,” the broadcaster said. overflowing, further complicating response efforts, CCTV reported. But it said the likelihood of an outright breach is “relatively low.”
