A chunk of Himalayan glacier broke loose Wednesday morning and, within roughly half an hour, killed at least 362 people and wiped out Nepal’s main overland gateway to China.
There was no rain and no warning. At about 8:40 a.m. local time, a section of the lower glacier sheared off at around 17,000 feet and fell some 3,900 feet onto the valley floor, picking up rock and sediment as it went. The resulting ice-and-rock avalanche slammed into the Lhende River in Tibet, about 12 miles northeast of the Nepal-China border crossing, sending a wall of mud and water down the Bhotekoshi into Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts. The U.S. Geological Survey later determined that a tremor first logged as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake was in fact the energy released by the collapse itself.
Nepal Police put the death toll at 359 as of 5 p.m. Thursday, with three more reported dead in Tibet by Chinese state media. More than 1,300 people are still missing across both sides of the border, over 700 of them foreign nationals — better than one in two of the missing. Among them are 177 Indians, 63 Americans, 34 Australians, 33 Britons and 25 Canadians.
The commercial damage runs the length of the corridor. At Rasuwagadhi-Timure, the flood swept away the customs yard along with the vehicles and imported goods parked there awaiting clearance. More than 500 vehicles are feared lost, many of them Chinese-brand cars — BYD, MG, Wuling and others — brought in through the Kerung route for upcoming auto shows. Power generation stopped at more than ten hydropower projects, including the 111-megawatt Rasuwagadhi plant, Chilime and Trishuli-3A, knocking roughly 430 megawatts offline. Two bridges are gone and stretches of the Pasang Lhamu Highway, the road linking Kathmandu to the region, are closed. With the Dashain festival weeks away, Nepal expects goods shortages, and Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle is running a response team out of the Timure customs office.
This is the second time in fourteen months the same river has done this. A July 2025 flood out of Tibet killed nine people, took out the Friendship Bridge and damaged the same dry port and power plants.
The fix is not engineering, it’s information. Nepali analysts are pressing for joint hazard mapping of the corridor with China, formal cross-border rescue protocols and a shared alert platform linking agencies on both sides — built before the next collapse rather than improvised during one. With ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya running at twice its 2000 rate, communities downstream may get only minutes of notice.
JBizNews Desk | Kathmandu
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