Nepal Toll Hits 939 With 500 Feared Trapped as Oxygen Falls
Nepal’s death toll rose to 939 with more than 4,400 missing, as officials said around five hundred workers may be trapped across a dozen flooded hydropower tunnels — and experts warned oxygen levels inside are falling. The country’s private power producers accused the government of losing crucial time by hesitating over foreign help. A fresh alert was issued on the Bhotekoshi river, with the barrier lake’s overflow peak forecast for tomorrow.
The tunnel arithmetic has hardened into the disaster’s cruellest equation: five hundred possible survivors, a dozen sites, falling oxygen, and a rescue apparatus that — by its own industry’s account — started days late because Kathmandu initially declined the specialist help it is now begging for. That accusation will shape the reckoning to come; the air pumped into Trishuli 3A yesterday bought time the earlier hesitation spent. Above it all, tomorrow’s forecast lake peak holds the whole valley hostage — a breach over the rescue sites would end every calculation at once. Campaigners’ claims that Beijing is concealing the Tibetan side’s true scale add a darker data problem. Watch the lake and the first tunnel excavation to break through — hope has a deadline now.