Emergency help in Nepal

Use these when a whole settlement is cut off rather than one person, when a district office is not answering, or when you need a decision that a local office cannot make. The toll-free numbers work from a phone with no credit on it.

• Ministry of Home Affairs control room

  Toll free

  गृह मन्त्रालय नियन्त्रण कक्ष

  1112

  Also+977-1-4211208+977-1-4211214

  control@moha.gov.np

  The national disaster control room, toll free on 1112. This is the government desk that coordinates rescue across districts, and the right number when a whole settlement is cut off rather than one person.

• Health Emergency Operation Centre

  Toll free

  स्वास्थ्य आपत्कालीन कार्य सञ्चालन केन्द्र

  1115

  Ministry of Health and Population, toll free. Health advice, where to take an injured person, and which hospital in an area is taking patients. The government has ordered free treatment for people injured in this flood — say so when you call.

• Nepal Police Headquarters, Naxal

  प्रहरी प्रधान कार्यालय

  1113

  Use 100 first. This is the headquarters line for when a district office is not answering and you need someone above it.

• Armed Police Force Headquarters, Halchok

  सशस्त्र प्रहरी बल

  1114

  The APF runs disaster rescue alongside the Army and the Police.

• Nepali Army — Directorate of Disaster Management

  नेपाली सेना, विपद् व्यवस्थापन निर्देशनालय

  +977-9863028539

  Also01-5979364

  dte-disastermgmt-office@nepalarmy.mil.np

  The mobile is the duty officer, staffed around the clock. The Army is flying the helicopter rescue in Rasuwa and Nuwakot; this is the directorate that tasks it.

Each province police office below is the one that coordinates the district offices under it. The link on every card opens that province’s own Nepal Police helpline page, which lists its district offices. Those numbers are mostly personal mobiles that move with the officer, so we send you to the source rather than serve you a copy that has quietly gone stale. Police control on 100 reaches all of them.

• Koshi कोशी

  Province police office · Biratnagar

  021-437001

  Bhojpur, Dhankuta, Ilam, Jhapa, Khotang, Morang, Okhaldhunga, Panchthar, Sankhuwasabha, Solukhumbu, Sunsari, Taplejung, Terhathum, Udayapur

  District offices for Koshi on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Madhesh मधेश

  Province police office · Janakpur

  9854029742

  madhesh@nepalpolice.gov.np

  Bara, Dhanusha, Mahottari, Parsa, Rautahat, Saptari, Sarlahi, Siraha

  District offices for Madhesh on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Bagmati बागमती

  Flood-affected

  Province police office · Hetauda, Makwanpur

  057-5214999855090240

  bagmati@nepalpolice.gov.np

  Bhaktapur, Chitwan, Dhading, Dolakha, Kathmandu, Kavrepalanchok, Lalitpur, Makwanpur, Nuwakot, Ramechhap, Rasuwa, Sindhuli, Sindhupalchok

  District offices for Bagmati on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Gandaki गण्डकी

  Flood-affected

  Province police office · Pokhara

  061-4625009856028433

  Baglung, Gorkha, Kaski, Lamjung, Manang, Mustang, Myagdi, Nawalpur, Parbat, Syangja, Tanahun

  District offices for Gandaki on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Lumbini लुम्बिनी

  Province police office · Tulsipur, Dang

  082-523410

  lumbini@nepalpolice.gov.np

  Arghakhanchi, Banke, Bardiya, Dang, Eastern Rukum, Gulmi, Kapilvastu, Nawalparasi (West), Palpa, Pyuthan, Rolpa, Rupandehi

  District offices for Lumbini on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Karnali कर्णाली

  Province police office · Birendranagar, Surkhet

  083-520811

  karnalispo_spokesperson@nepalpolice.gov.np

  Dailekh, Dolpa, Humla, Jajarkot, Jumla, Kalikot, Mugu, Salyan, Surkhet, Western Rukum

  District offices for Karnali on nepalpolice.gov.np

• Sudurpashchim सुदूरपश्चिम

  Province police office · Dhangadhi

  091-52110398584900509858420058

  spaschim_comm@nepalpolice.gov.np

  Achham, Baitadi, Bajhang, Bajura, Dadeldhura, Darchula, Doti, Kailali, Kanchanpur

  District offices for Sudurpashchim on nepalpolice.gov.np

Kathmandu Valley district offices

Listed separately because the college is in Bhaktapur and most people reading this page are either in the Valley or trying to reach it. These are the three district police offices, published by Nepal Police for Bagmati Province.

• Kathmandu01-426194501-4261790
• Lalitpur01-5521207
• Bhaktapur01-6614821

A disaster does not fall on everyone the same way. These desks exist because the person who needs them is usually not the person who needs disaster control, and in a relief camp they are frequently the first number that should have been called.

• National Women Commission — Khabar Garau

  Toll free

  खबर गरौँ

  1145

  Also01-425670101-4250246

  Toll free, 24 hours, for women and girls: violence, trafficking, an unsafe shelter, or being separated from a family in a relief camp.

• Child Helpline Nepal (CWIN)

  Toll free

  बाल हेल्पलाइन

  1098

  Toll free, for a child who is missing, unaccompanied, or at risk.

• Tourist Police

  पर्यटक प्रहरी

  1144

  Also01-422635901-4226403

  For foreign visitors, and for Nepali families whose relative was trekking or driving in the affected corridor.

• Nepal Red Cross Central Blood Bank, Soaltee Mode

  केन्द्रीय रक्त संचार सेवा

  01-5006465

  Open 24 hours. Regional transfusion centres run in Biratnagar, Pokhara, Nepalgunj and Chitwan; ask this number which one is nearest you.

• Hello Sarkar

  Toll free

  हेलो सरकार

  1111

  The Prime Minister's Office grievance line. Not a rescue number — the one to use when a government office is refusing to act and you need that on record.

The short codes above are reachable only from inside the country. From abroad, dial the full numbers with the +977 country code, or use the mission numbers below. A large share of the people unaccounted for on this river are foreign nationals, and their embassies are being given the recovery lists directly.

• Embassy of India, Kathmandu — flood helpline

  +977-9851316807+977-9709107500+977-9810326117

  All three take WhatsApp, which is what to use if you are calling from outside Nepal.

If your country has no mission listed here, contact your own foreign ministry and ask them to raise it with their mission in Kathmandu, and give the same details to the Tourist Police on 1144. Nepal’s tourism board is keeping a separate register of missing visitors and it is fed from those two routes.

Missing-person reports for this disaster are taken at district police offices, and they are collated centrally from there. Go to the district office where the person was last known to be, not the one where you live, because that is the office holding the recovery records for that stretch of river. If you cannot travel, call the province office in the list above and ask them to take it by phone.

Have these ready before you call, because the officer will ask for all of them:

• Full name as written on the citizenship or passport, and age.
• The last place they were known to be, and the last time anyone spoke to them.
• What they were wearing, and any vehicle, plate number or bus they were travelling on.
• A recent photograph, and any identifying mark.
• Your own number, and a second number that will be answered if yours cannot be.

Give the same details to the Nepal Police control line on 100 as well. The two records are kept separately and a name in only one of them is a name that can be missed.

Relief for this disaster is being run under a one-door policy. Private organisations, groups and individuals may not independently collect money or materials for it, and unauthorised collections are illegal, including the ones being organised on social media right now. The reason is not bureaucratic: uncoordinated collections in past disasters put lorries of the wrong goods on the only open road while the right ones waited behind them.

So the college is not opening a fund and is not taking collections, and neither should you. Money goes to the Prime Minister's Disaster Relief Fund:

Account

01905631210046

Bank

Himalayan Bank

SWIFT, for transfers from abroad

HIMANPKA

Goods, rather than money, go to one of three collection points. Call the focal person before you load anything, and ask what is actually needed that day. The answer changes, and the wrong pallet occupies a road.

• Relief arriving from outside Nepal

  National Emergency Operation Centre warehouse, Tribhuvan International Airport

  +977-9841879222

  Shraddha Bhattarai

• Relief for Nuwakot

  Nepali Army, Maithali Barracks, Battar

  +977-9851234324

  Aabishkar

• Relief for Dhading

  Nepali Army, Baireni Barracks

  +977-9851154226

  Dilip Ghale

Blood is the one thing an individual can give directly and immediately. The Red Cross central blood bank number is in the specialist list above, and it will tell you which centre near you is short.

The flood took out 41 bridges, 19 of them motorable, and about 40 kilometres of road between Rasuwagadhi and Malekhu. Where a bridge is gone, a helicopter is currently the only way in and out. Check 103 before you set out, not after. This is what was closed as of 31 August 2026:

• Prithvi Highway

  Severed at Krishnabhir in Dhading, and completely blocked

  The Trishuli has eroded the base of the road at Krishnabhir in Benighat Rorang and the carriageway has subsided. This is the Kathmandu–Muglin–Narayangadh road: if you are travelling to the Valley from Pokhara, Chitwan, Butwal or anywhere further west, this is your road, and there is no published date for its reopening.

• Pasang Lhamu Highway (Galchhi–Syaphrubesi)

  Gone, not merely closed

  The Rasuwa road, through the reach the flood destroyed. The Friendship Bridge at Rasuwagadhi, the main crossing into China, went with it. This was the all-weather route to Kerung and it no longer exists as a road.

• Araniko Highway and the Tatopani crossing

  Tatopani border point closed by China on 31 August

  Closed on landslide risk, which removes the obvious alternative to Rasuwagadhi for anything crossing the northern border.

• Muglin–Narayangadh

  Opening and closing along the Trishuli on flood risk

  NDRRMA warned again on 30 August that flows in the Bhote Koshi had risen. Check before you set out; this stretch has been stopping and restarting all week.

Swipe for all 2 →

Every settlement on this river is now next to a channel a different width from the one it was built beside, and stretches of the valley floor are carrying an estimated ten to eighteen metres of new sediment. Rebuilding here starts with deciding what that ground is now, which is a survey problem before it is a construction one.

On the morning of 26 August 2026 (10 Bhadra 2083), shortly after 8:30 in the morning, a glacier collapse on the Nepal–China border, north of Langtang Lirung, which sent an ice-and-rock avalanche about 1,200 metres down into the Lhende Khola, into the Bhote Koshi and then the Trishuli. There was no monsoon behind it and almost no warning: the wave covered its first stretch at roughly 193 kilometres an hour, the Trishuli rose 9 metres in 30 minutes, and it destroyed settlements along 72 kilometres of river. Nepal’s flood gauges in that reach are built for a river that rises over hours. This one arrived in minutes. The magnitude 5.2 tremor first reported as an earthquake was the landslide itself, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Confirmed dead

1,294

Still missing

5,053

Rescued

13,095

Missing from hydropower sites

933

Nepal only, from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority on the evening of 4 September 2026, released to the press rather than in one of its numbered morning reports, so no hour was given. Nepal Police publishes a higher count on a different basis, which includes partial remains; this page stays with one authority rather than taking whichever number is newest. Separate figures are reported across the border in Tibet. 5,663 people have been treated in all: 314 at hospitals, 3,266 by the Nepali Army and 2,083 by the Armed Police Force. The hydropower figure in the row above is the 31 August 2026 count, the last precise one the authority published; on 3 September it said only “around 900”.

Treat every number on this page as the last one we could check. This page said 389 dead and 910 missing for three days, and it was the official count when it was written. Here is what happened to it while it sat there.

Of the 5,053 unaccounted for, 583 are foreign nationals, which NDRRMA restated on 4 September 2026. Its last published breakdown beyond that is 3 September 2026, when it counted 164 Nepalis travelling with those visitors and 83 serving security personnel: 45 Nepali Army, 25 Nepal Police, 13 Armed Police Force. Those two have not been republished since, so they are that day’s numbers against a total that has moved. The largest single group is the 933 people who were at work on the hydropower projects, and they have their own post below.

The deaths and the missing are not in the same places, and if you are reading this from Chitwan or Nawalparasi that difference is the reason this is your disaster too. The water started at the Nepal–China border and it was still killing people 240 kilometres later, across the Indian border. Upstream, in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, it mostly did not leave bodies to recover.

The line that debris stopped at is the only thing separating the houses above it from the ones that are not there any more, and it was decided by the shape of the ground rather than by anything anybody did.

Rasuwa and Nuwakot are the districts the flood destroyed: the settlements, the roads and the bridges went, and between them those two hold about 4,470 of the missing. The most deaths in the table are in Nawalparasi East and Nawalparasi West. Its 7 districts add to 935, and a further 359 human remains were recovered from locations the authority did not assign to a district, which together make the 1,294 above. Chitwan is not in that table and it was the largest entry in the last one. NDRRMA listed 355 deaths there on 3 September and lists none on 4 September 2026, while the unlocated line appeared at 359. The authority did not explain the change and we are not going to guess at it for them: bodies were recovered in Chitwan and Nepal Police still counts them there. The government has declared 3 days of national mourning, has declared the affected local levels a disaster zone for 3 months, and has ordered treatment free at government hospitals for anyone injured in this flood.

This was not a monsoon flood and it was not an earthquake, and both of those are still being repeated. What happened was a bedrock failure high on the ridge, about 20 kilometres above the border, which took the glacier sitting on top of it down as well. A face roughly 600 metres across fell 1,200 metres into the Lhende Khola. The United States Geological Survey first read the shock as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake and later corrected it: the magnitude 5.2 signal was made by the collapse, not the other way round.

The volume is the part that is hard to hold in your head. Between 100 and 200 million cubic metres of rock and ice came off the mountain at once. What made it lethal, though, was not the volume but the sequence: the debris dammed the river, water ponded behind a wall nobody had designed and nobody was watching, and then that wall failed. A river that would normally carry that water over a day carried it in minutes.

It also arrived bigger than it left. Friction melted ice into the flow, and the flow tore sediment off the bed and the banks as it went, so what started as water reached the settlements as moving ground. At Timure it was described as a wall of water about 100 metres high. That is why the damage does not look like flooding.

The buildings in that frame did not fall down. The ground came up around them, which is why the recovery is being done with excavators rather than by searching rubble, and why the missing outnumber the dead by nearly five to one.

A photograph shows you one bend of the river. These show you all 72 kilometres of it. The first pair is the same frame a fortnight apart, so the brown is the only thing that changed.

Swipe for all 6 →

If you want to see the ground rather than the satellite, these are the published galleries. They open on the publisher’s own site, which is where those photographs are licensed to be.

• Rasuwa flood in pictures, from Rasuwagadhi to Bidur

  Onlinekhabar

  Nepali coverage, and the closest set to the ground the flood actually crossed.

• Rescuers drill into tunnels to reach trapped workers

  Al Jazeera

  The tunnel rescue itself, which is where most of the missing are.

• Satellite images of the damage to homes, power plants and bridges

  Bloomberg

  Higher-resolution commercial imagery than anything that can be published here.

• EMSR927, the European damage-assessment mapping

  Copernicus EMS

  Building-by-building grading of Syabrubesi and the border reach. More than 240 buildings destroyed in the mapped area alone.

The collapse was detected. A seismometer at Jilong, 12 kilometres away, recorded it within seconds, and so did the station at Zhangmu. Nothing turned that into a warning. Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology found out about the flood roughly 16 minutes after it had already crossed the border, by telephone, relayed from the Rasuwa district office through the national disaster authority. The SMS alerts went out after that, by which time upper Rasuwa was gone.

The obvious question is why the river gauges did not catch it, and the answer is that they are the wrong instrument for this. A gauge measures a flood that has already arrived. On a monsoon flood that is enough, because the level climbs for hours and the crossing of a threshold leaves time to act. On this, the level crossed every threshold and the peak arrived in the same few minutes, and several of the gauges were destroyed immediately afterwards.

Underneath both of those is a problem no amount of Nepali equipment fixes. The hazard starts in another country. Every instrument Nepal owns on this river sits below the thing that needed detecting, and the one instrument above it belongs to a state with no agreement in place to turn its readings into an alarm here. This is the third flood in three years to come down this same transboundary watershed.

The Trishuli is a hydropower river, so the wave went through working power stations in the middle of a Wednesday shift. 933 people who were at work on those projects are missing, across 11 projects, and 361 have been rescued or walked out on their own. They were civil, electrical and electronics engineers, technicians and construction crews. This college’s own profession, and most of them will have trained in colleges like this one. We are an engineering college and we are not going to write about this flood without saying so.

That figure was 133 on this page from 28 to 31 August, when only four projects had reported. It is now a seventh of everyone unaccounted for in the whole disaster. The two bodies counting it do not quite agree, which is normal this early and is better said than smoothed over: the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority says 933 and the Independent Power Producers’ Association says 934.

Most of them are underground. The Nepali Army has put 19 tunnels in priority order, and this is what a rescue at one of them is actually trying to do.

It does work. This is the tunnel at Upper Trishuli-1 after the Army brought 350 people out of it alive.

• Upper Trishuli-1

  350 people have been brought out of the tunnel at this 216 MW project in Rasuwa. More than 100 are still believed to be inside it.

• Trishuli 3A

  The Army found the tunnel crown on 30 August and drilled through it. Water is standing high inside a bore about seven metres across. Ropes went down, rescuers called, and nothing answered. The Army puts at least 35 people inside; Nepal Police puts it near 200.

• Langtang Khola

  Around 60 workers were inside a tunnel. The powerhouse was swept away days before the project was due to start generating.

• Rasuwagadhi and Chilime

  Staff are unaccounted for after the plants and the customs yard beside them were destroyed. Over 300 vehicles went with them.

431 megawatts left the national grid with them, and another 470 megawatts of projects still being built were damaged, so expect power cuts for a long time. If you are a family member of someone who was on one of these sites, the project operators are reporting to the district authorities, and the missing-person route above is the same one everybody else is using. Use it as well, not instead.

There is a design question inside that number, and it is a question rather than an accusation. The Trishuli carries 10 projects that were damaged or destroyed in one morning. A run-of-river scheme puts its intake, its powerhouse, its yard and its shift on the valley floor, because that is where the water is. The valley floor is also the one place a debris flow is guaranteed to go.

The honest starting point is that nothing on this list would have stopped the mountain coming down. The question is only ever how much of the 35 minutes between the collapse and the first Nepali village you can hand to the people living in it, and how much more you can hand to everyone further down.

The first fix is not a better sensor. It is an automatic path from a sensor that already fired to a siren that never rang, and a cross-border agreement that lets a reading taken on one side of a line ring a bell on the other. The electronics for that are cheap and forty years old. The agreement is the hard part, and it is the part that has now failed three times in three years on this one river.

The second is the standing inventory. Nepal, Tibet and India between them hold 3,624 mapped glacial lakes. 47 of those are rated potentially dangerous, and 21 of those are inside Nepal. Two have had mitigation work done on them, on the most recent count we could source, which is a 2011 ICIMOD study. If a newer figure exists it should replace this one.

The lake behind this flood was in Tibet, which is worth saying plainly: it sits in the 25 rather than the 21, and it was outside anything Nepal could have drained by itself. Since 1977 the country has recorded 26 outburst floods, and 14 of them started at home. Those are the ones a lake programme reaches.

The last one is the uncomfortable one, and it is the reason this section exists on a college website rather than a ministry one. Nepal has already built exactly the system everyone is now calling for.

Tsho Rolpa was lowered 3 metres of the 20 its engineers said full mitigation needed, for US$3.2 million, with sirens and air horns in 19 villages fed by 17 warning stations. It was finished in 2002. It stopped working in 2002. The hydrology was right and the structure got built, and it still protected nobody, because a warning network is an operating commitment with a budget every year and a named person responsible, and it was paid for once as construction and then belonged to nobody.

That is the failure most likely to be repeated after this flood, while the money is available and the attention is on. If a student reading this ends up working on the reconstruction, it is the thing worth arguing about in the meeting.

Call the college if this has reached your family. Whatever it is, a funeral, a missing relative, a house gone, a road you cannot cross, tell us before you worry about a deadline and we will work around it.

01-5091616

There is one deadline we cannot move, and you should know how it falls. The second IOE merit list published on 30 August, 10:00 am, and admission from it ran to 2 September, 3:00 pm. That hour was set centrally by the Institute of Engineering, not by us: a seat not taken by then goes back into the pool for the third list, which publishes 6 September, 10:00 am and closes 8 September, 3:00 pm. So if the roads have already cost you the second list, the third is the one to be ready for. The Prithvi Highway is the road most applicants from west of the Valley travel on, and it is severed at Krishnabhir with no reopening date.

You do not have to be standing at our counter to take the seat. Our online admission desk completes the whole thing from a phone. You sign in with the IOE roll number you already have, and it works on a slow connection. Bring your original documents to campus whenever the roads let you. If you would rather have a person do it with you, call the number above and we will walk through it on the phone.

If you are already studying here rather than applying, IOE has revised your Bhadra semester routine twice, on 31 August and again on 2 September. The regular BE and BAR papers now begin on 13 September, one year at a time over four days. How far your own papers moved depends on your year, and it is not the same number for anybody. We read all three routines against each other and published what moved, beside the road status above, at getting to the examination hall on the revised dates.

If the flood put you in hospital, in mourning, or out of your home, and you miss a paper because of it, even one on the revised routine, Tribhuvan University’s Registrar wrote on 3 September that you get a separate sitting on par with the regular exam, to be held within the second week of Ashwin, 24 to 30 September, on certified documents: hospital admission papers for the injured, a certificate from your local body for a bereavement or a lost home. The letter and what it asks of you are on our notice board. Call the number above and we will take the documents to the Dean’s office with you.