At least 17 people are dead and hundreds are missing – as many as 400 international tourists among them – on Wednesday after a flash flood tore through the high valleys of the Himalayas along the border between China and Nepal, CNN reports. Calling it a “flash flood” is actually underselling it as the deluge was not from a rainstorm but a tertiary effect of an earthquake. Nepalese officials say a 4.4-magnitude tremor – mild for the seismically-active region – caused a landslide which in turn blocked a river until the natural dam gave way and sent all the accumulated river flow downhill.
How much time between the quake and when the landslide blockage on the Lhende Khola River collapsed is unclear, but just from footage it may have been at a volume significantly greater than any one downpour of rain could trigger in a single burst. Among those missing are 60 members of a crew building a hydroelectric dam along another river downstream, guys whose project managers and engineering leads’ most important mission is mitigating the very terrifying hazard that befell them, evidently without warning. That and China’s declaration of a “mass casualty incident” on the Tibet side of the border could tragically serve as an ominous sign of a far greater cataclysm across a vast, rugged region than any anodyne headline about the “missing” could. Pretty fucking depressing.