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Nuwakot: Rescuers in Nepal and China were still battling Saturday to locate thousands of people missing days after a deadly, tsunami-like wall of water and debris swept through the Himalayan region, engulfing villages.<\/strong><\/p>\n The number of missing soared past 2,400 on Friday as emergency teams said they had recovered 623 bodies \u2014 with some of the dead possibly swept downstream as far away as India.<\/p>\n In an area home to vast energy infrastructure projects, Nepal\u2019s disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to a missing persons list already including trekkers and pilgrims to Tibet\u2019s sacred Mount Kailash.<\/p>\n Those that made it out say they have lost everything and now face an agonising wait to discover the fate of missing loved ones, and the prospect of rebuilding their lives from nothing.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the settlements near the river were swept away. There is nothing left,\u201d survivor Buddhi Ram Dangol told AFP.<\/p>\n Samjhana Thing said she had been waiting three days for news of her missing brother.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t know anything. Hopefully he is in a safe place,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The trauma of Wednesday\u2019s catastrophe has been \u201cenormous\u201d, and as many as 93,000 people may have been affected, the Red Cross said, with the death toll expected to rise.<\/p>\n Emergency teams had been racing to retrieve survivors from affected zones, where the widespread devastation meant food and water supplies were running out.<\/p>\n Compounding the search for the missing have been fears of further flooding in affected areas.<\/p>\n The deluge of ice and mud caused huge lakes to form, and one of these formations has become a direct threat to emergency workers scouring the region for survivors.<\/p>\n Nepali police urged all rescuers to \u201cimmediately move to a safe location\u201d, saying they had received information that \u201ca water dam has burst again on the Tibetan side\u201d.<\/p>\n In Tibet, where Chinese authorities are the only source of information, Beijing suspended its rescue operation at the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding, before saying the threat had eased.<\/p>\n State news agency Xinhua reported early Saturday morning that two villagers had been rescued in the area.<\/p>\n On the Nepali side of the border, the military located people trapped in the tunnel of the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, where they were working to find a way in to extract the survivors.<\/p>\n \u201cTwo helicopters have been dispatched, but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,\u201d army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet told AFP.<\/p>\n Some 350 workers and residents have been brought to safety from the site, he added, but efforts were ongoing to rescue more than a hundred trapped in the same area.<\/p>\n Workers rescued from other dam projects along the Trishuli valley described a disaster that unfolded with terrifying speed.<\/p>\n Buddha Tamang told AFP he survived only because he was inside a tunnel at the dam where he worked when the flood struck.<\/p>\n \u201cThe senior officers working on the other side, they were all swept away,\u201d Tamang, who was airlifted on Thursday after being marooned for more than 24 hours, told AFP.<\/p>\n Nepal reported a death toll of 616 people on Saturday.<\/p>\n\u2013 \u2018Enormous\u2019 trauma \u2013<\/h2>\n
\u2013 \u2018All swept away\u2019 \u2013<\/h2>\n