The glacier, spanning more than 3,800 feet in width, broke away from a mountain face and plunged roughly 4,000 feet into the river valley, generating 30‑foot‑high waves of debris that surged for miles downstream, according to Nepali officials.
The torrent demolished a multistory border building, toppled about 70 bridges and destroyed miles of highway, and deposited mud and boulders over twelve under‑construction hydropower stations along the Trishuli river.
The Nepali army, leading rescue operations, reported that 121 people were trapped inside the buried plants; only three men have been rescued alive so far, while five bodies were recovered from the Upper Trishuli‑1 site in early September.
Families of the missing have taken to the streets in Kathmandu. On a recent September day, Sumana Shrestha Amatya stood with other protesters demanding faster government action to locate loved ones, including her husband Sunil, a geologist who remains unaccounted for.
Geoscientist Rajendran, an Indian expert critical of large‑scale Himalayan construction, warned that the disaster could recur elsewhere in the range if cumulative risks are not assessed, a view echoed by river specialist Dandekar, who blames the World Bank’s risk‑assessment report for omitting the “cumulative disaster risk” of multiple projects on the same river.
The Upper Trishuli‑1 project, one of the basin’s biggest, cost Nepal over half a billion dollars and was financed by roughly $300 million in loans and equity from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Independent experts who visited the site in 2024 said no climate‑resilience assessment had been carried out, a gap the World Bank acknowledged could be revisited as new information emerges.
The flood has reignited debate over the safety of Himalayan hydropower development. With 36 projects already operating in the Trishuli basin, experts say the combination of frequent earthquakes, landslides and accelerating glacier melt—driven by climate change—creates a “high‑risk” environment that demands comprehensive, basin‑wide impact studies before further construction proceeds.