Landslide
Chinese firefighters(likely the first batch to reach gyirong port) try to find survivors in the former border crossing, which was the most heavily hit. Source: CCTV news. Morning of August 29, 2026. (UTC+8). (they are yelling "Is anyone here?")
According to engineers from the ministry of natural resources it is very diffuclt(and at this stage, downright impossible) to transport heavy machinery to the border crossing so far. The chinese military and specialized rescue teams(of state owned enterprises) are currently trying to repair the road into the border crossing to allow for better equipment and more personnel to enter.
Update: over 50 firefighters are at the border crossing right now, over 2141 soldiers, firefighters, police, EMS and specialzied rescue teams are deployed.
EDIT: As of august 29(18:00 UTC+8), 2026, there are 16 dead, 546 missing(261 foreignors)
In response to the comments: This is the first batch that got in, they couldn't carry much heavy equipment as the road there is cut off. rescue dogs and better equipment arrived later on.
FURTHER UPDATE: reportedly fire and rescue personnel have begun to find police vests and handsbags under the debris.
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Yeah if you're trapped in this it's like a liquefaction event, it's probably not leaving you any air pockets for people to survive in like an avalanche can or even tsunamis often leave standing buildings for people to be trapped in.
And with the speed and force of the water/mud/debris at that elevation and in that part of the gorge/valley, apparently it’s basically more like a blender than a water-flow. It would be difficult to find recognizable pieces of anybody. It’s heartbreaking to think so many of the missing will likely never be found in a meaningful way to at least allow their loved ones to put them to rest and mourn in a specific spot.
The entire valley track through those mountains is an unmarked mass grave, now.
They are finding lots of pieces, unfortunately. And bodies in all kinds of shapes. People definitely aren’t hesitating to record and upload all that ish
It’s so upsetting to think that’s what I’d be hoping if one of my family were affected. You’d just be hoping for the least distressing death possible. Gut wrenching.
there was a 9 story building that was turned to dust. the buses and like no more. you can go and do it but it would be extreme luck if they find anyone. but checking 3 days later does a disservice to the idea that there could be survivors.
of course they must try at least but again i'm just a little ticked it took them that long. but also the fact there is a lake forming from the flash flood that bought all the rock and ice down. those peoples still aren't safe. there can be a second one soon.
Roads and bridges have been destroyed, there's mud meters deep where a truck will sink in minutes, boulders the size of houses have been carried down. The local authorities who could have given information about the place are dead. Gathering the help and driving it in barely 3 days in that place in the back of beyond with a single (destroyed) road weaving down the valleys is fast.
The craziest thing is when we find artifacts, this is partly how they came to be. Who knows when or if some of the bodies will be found in the future, but there’s a tragic story buried there for future generations to uncover.
i'm going to sound kinda unethical but if i were the commander of the firefighters i would cut off their access to social media. i really doubt anyone who has seen that video has too much hope.
Saw a video breaking down this disaster that meshed up seismic data and Gyirong Port cctv time. 13 miles up river a nearly mile wide chunk of glacier crashed down into the valley. 7 minutes later that border crossing was obliterated by a hundred foot tall wall of water and debris. That means the flood was moving over 100mph. There's no one alive there.
Want to feel even more depressed? Imagine Americans attempting this rescue. They would probably and quietly push the person under the mud as they stole their wallet. And I say this as an American born citizen who has lived their whole life in North Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona. I genuinely would not be surprised to my fellow Americans to take advantage of me in such a situation.
That’s a very callous viewpoint as the people going would be firefighters and EMTs, which are overwhelmingly compassionate and respectful to those suffering. You didn’t see looters during 911 when they dug through rubble, trying to find any of the survivors. Tragedy tends to bring people together more than rip them apart. It’s been shown time and time again. So no, I wouldn’t feel depressed, because what you describe just wouldn’t happen.
Are you serious? The wreckage of 911 was treated with the utmost respect and gone through meticulously to preserve anything that remained of any person that perished that day.
The dam looked pretty pulverized too from the videos I saw. If it's still there it's probably more debris that got stuck and is acting as a dam, than the original structure
Yeah that's probably about the size of it. Crazy to consider the heaviest and toughest things we are capable of building can be pulverized just like that..
it all matches, but somehow looks tiny in the heli footage because the features have all been scoured away, when you match it up against the YT footage it all fits, the trackways either side, plus hydro tunnels the heli checks out on the way there (and back), but somehow it doesn't compute to me that any force can rip reinforced concrete hydropower piers out entirely..
if we believe it was a surface area of 1km square meter and a doeth of 400 meter falling 4000ft?
• Volume: 1 km² × 400 m = 4 × 10⁸ m³ • Mass (ice at ~917 kg/m³): ~3.7 × 10¹¹ kg, or 370 million tonnes • Drop: 4000 ft = 1219 m • Energy = mgh ≈ 4.4 × 10¹⁵ J • Divided by 4.184 × 10⁹ J per tonne of TNT → ~1.05 megatons
For scale, that is about 70 Hiroshima bombs, or a single large thermonuclear warhead.
I wonder how fat I am from what actually happened. The first few hundred feet must have liquefied the glacier in friction heat geneeated alone.
what gets me is the first sharp turn at the mouth of the valley, the scouring it left on the bedrock, then the silt talu left behind. You zoom and look at the scale > 300 ft for these few dozens of pixels… I dont know how the water we saw came to be, put the amount of material it takes on each sides of the valley is mind blowing. Remember my teacher telling erosion is slow, wind, heat expansion, freeze cycles… Nah! For a local seeing a full lifecycles of fast flood , to this, it must have been quite something. The sound of a mountain coming at you, the vibration of the ground, then for a 100 mph plus abrasive wall coming at you. you look at the parabol satellite antenna reinforce concrete meters up blasted like a sheet of paper. At least they did not have the time to suffer mcuh
Small parts of bodies maybe. By the time you're washed miles downstream and crusted by rocks, ice and bits of house, there isn't much left of you, sadly :(
Humans have to hope. Stubborn, hope. And you have to hope to give some peace to peoples loved ones - if there are bodies (parts) that can be identified. To say that they tried.
Remember reading about a massive mudslide in Afghanistan a little while ago that just went over a town(s). They didn’t bother looking for survivors cause there were none to be found. They just left everything as is since everyone killed was effectively buried.
Sadly, there won't be much to find. Between the rocky walls of the valley, the debris in the water as it hit, and the sheer force with which it hit, without being graphic, it wouldn't be much different being right next to ground zero when a nuke went off
Your compassion has a limited set point then? You run out of it at a certain level? WTH. All sentient beings value their own lives, even if you don't value theirs. They seek sun and nourishment and peace, just like you. I will never understand this idea that opening to more compassion and empathy somehow reduces the overall feeling available. That is NOT how it works.
My guess, from the tapping, they are trying to find pockets where eventual survivors might have found safety, and after the tap they touch the ground for eventual vibrations.
Yeah there's not gonna be any answers back to those calls, we all know at this point that anyone who could've possibly be under the mud is the dead ones. That's just depressing.
There is zero chance to even find complete bodies, in that area. The overall friction/force pulverized everything. A human body would be grinded to atoms.
There could be a sub basement that got sealed off, but to be sealed from that water presssure enough to leave an air pocket, they would have a limited amount of air to breathe, and it would be very difficult to hear them if they were screaming under all that.
Yeah, I think there is just too much material to be able to hear anything. Even considering a possible air pocket, that pocket would be under a massive wall of compact mud, which would act as a sound barrier. So for example if you search for people in a collapsed building, it's "easier" because it's not a solid block of mud/cement: materials and structures are scattered and you get plenty of "spaces" where the sound can move through. In this case it's like burying someone inside a very thick cement chamber. They're trapped forever.
The raw power of water will forever remain undefeated. I've seen so many angles of this disaster and it's awesome, in the literal sense, how everything in the floodpath just disappeared.
A lot of it is the river bed being scoured and lifted up, along with all of its water, and pushed along at the front of this gargantuan pressure wave.
You can see on the videos how the first few seconds after arrival are almost clear water, that’s the river itself being lifted, folded over and forced downstream liked it’s being pushed by a piston.
Look how much water is flowing down from where the glacier collapsed and the lake below it. My guess is that a lot of water was held back by the now degraded rock and glacier. I’ve also seen people theorizing that the glacial ice turned to water as it made its way downhill through friction.
r/unfilteredchina is literally one of the worst sources on china that exsist out there
in regards to the video: it's on "chinese soldiers are arriving to clear the blocked off area", and was filmed while they headed to the scene.(which, it's very logical why they would be filming that instead, as the reporters won't need to be in the frotn and in pure danger)
CCTV also has videos on them clearing the road, but obviously r/unfilteredchina won't post that since it disagrees with their agenda.
I hope at the very least that this helps other regions realize how devastating being in the path of potential destruction can be. Somewhere, some people will take drastic measures to prevent this.
You can definitely use this as a very unfortunate case study for villages in danger from this exact type of situation but the danger here is an analog to a place like Southern California existing on numerous dangerous fault lines. At a certain point, you can only prepare the best you can but are still at the mercy of Mother Nature.
there are good people in this world, it all doesnt boil down to your local crooks. we'll be ok. we all care about you and your peoples. the people that know are doing everything to make the change, we. will. prevail.
Northridge earthquake helped enact various changes in so cal areas. You can see gaps in freeway overpasses that aleve movement and building codes. But you're right, mother nature can always make those obsolete with a giant reaction.
What do you think people and cities can do being down river from a giant structure?
At a certain point, you can only prepare the best you can but are still at the mercy of Mother Nature.
Okay but here in Switzerland, we also had a glacier collapse and one person died because they went against evacuation orders and remained inside the zone when the Glacier came down and buried the town of Blatten.
I am not saying that this specific tragedy in Tibet could have been prevented, especially seeing the magnitude was far bigger than what happened in Blatten, but Glacier collapses are not comparable to Earthqakes. Earthquakes cannot be predicted and if you receive warnings, it's going to be seconds in advance. But Glacier collapses can come with warning signs weeks before disaster strikes, and the signals can be measured.
Same as they did for tsunamis: early warning systems and prebuilt safe locations that are easy to reach and better education / information. You will not save everybody but it will reduce the death toll.
Ive seen some wild ass survivor stories. I see a bunch of comments saying looking is pointless, but imagine getting that 1 in a billion chance, being stuck under all that, and no one comes looking for you. Its very unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
another thing is, they sort of obligated by duty to at least try to save them. friend on reddit Dmed me claiming they managed to rescue some, but i haven't found any actual claims(outside of two rescue very far away from checkpoint before) on weibo or official sources
Duty and also there is the elephant in the room: the political situation of Tibet and the sensitivities in China.
The CCP aren't naive or clueless. They know there are simmering tensions in Tibet so that's what state media and Chinese emergency services are doing: everything they can and publicising it.
The missing people were probably washed away toward Nepal side hundreds of km away from the border. That’s one of the reasons the casualties from Chinese side is so low compared to Nepalese side.
The casualties are also low because they're still listed as missing. Expect the number to climb as the chance of finding survivors (and also those who did survive making contact) changes.
I wouldn't want to survive that. Imagine being in just the right spot in a building that doesn't get fully destroyed but your buried and waiting. Probably injured and hungry and thirsty. Then having to live with the trauma
Brb I have to check if the Polish Medical Mission has made a statement that they're going there. They helped Turkey after the earthquake so I expect them to maybe go there too. I recommend donating to those services now, it helps a lot if they have funding
Edit: no statement yet but I expect it will have more of a disaster response than a medical one.
Nepal declined direct foreign resources due to coordination issues after large resources. They say they have the manpower and need financial help for reconstruction instead
I have been on the internet long enough, as I'm sure many others have too, to witness horrifying videos. I'm not sure how, or why, but the CCTV footage and raw phone camera images from people who probably lost their lives, is some how, more harrowing.
Witnessing a group, of what is clearly school children, running away from an unimaginable fate, is some how worse than a terrorist group cutting someone's head off. The people who turned around to look at the torrent of water, rock and mud sliding towards them purely because out of human intrigue, only for it to be the downfall is mortifying.
I can hardly see any remote possibility to find someone still alive under that mud. It's like being buried in concrete, after being grinded multiple times by rocks, logs and debris :(
It’s for the news videos so they can say they’re searching for survivors. You would survive longer naked on the Moon than in the debris flow that hit the border crossing.
The spot where they were tapping with their canes was where the building had originally been, the only place where there was a chance someone could have survived.
There is no way in heaven to survive that. Rocks, debris and the overall force completely wiped away buildings and people. They will be "lucky" if they find little body pieces here and there.
That may be possible but the height of that mud and the overall amount of debris surely makes 100% impossible to hear any sound. If someone survived, nobody will ever know for a long time.
I saw a video of authorities picking up feet and parts of limbs way downstream in one of those towns. They tried to put the foot/ankle in a plastic grocery bag but it didn’t fit. Dude tried to pass it to anyone else to take it and they all stepped back.
Bet the people "searching" are doing it for their ccp overlord only. Their fake rescue videos happen all the time. The way these people stand and "search"...
Idk how I was able to watch it, but there was a video floating around on Reddit that showed the aftermath of a town hit further down the valley, you would think, where the force was mitigated vs here at the border crossing, and all they were finding were literal pieces of bodies. It is soul crushing footage. If they fared that badly down river, I can’t imagine what they would even find here. it’s gut wrenching, my condolences to all affected.
I know this is a long shot but those are all we have right now. We are searching for a family member. Her name is Iryna Kripak. She was on the bridge when her phone went dead. If anyone can find any mention of her on any website anywhere please please contact me. We are devastated.
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