Nepal Toll Rises to 669 as Anger at Government Mounts
Nepal’s death toll rose to 669 with nearly 3,000 missing across the border region, as survivors’ anger mounted over delays in aid and in tracing missing relatives. Kathmandu formally requested foreign technical help with body identification, DNA testing and the hydropower tunnel rescues; more than 250 foreign nationals have been rescued. A Chinese team that reached the Friendship Bridge crossing found, in one rescuer’s words, nothing but ruins. Thirty-three Britons remain missing.
Day five is when disasters turn political: the adrenaline of rescue gives way to the arithmetic of recovery, and the questions survivors shout at officials — where was the warning, where is the aid, where are our dead — become the questions a government must answer or fall to. Nepal’s late acceptance of foreign help now extends to the grimmest specialities, body storage and DNA matching, which is quiet acknowledgment of what the missing count means. The request list is itself a map of the state’s gaps. For the British families in Kathmandu, each day narrows hope while the naming of the missing — a Berkshire woman among them — makes the abstraction personal. Watch the lake’s forecast Tuesday peak, and whether anger organises.