The mudslide that came down on both sides of the China-Nepal border on Wednesday has killed at least 472 people, with 1,400 missing, 20 Minutes reported on Friday from AFP. BFMTV's running account put the toll at 480 — 477 in Nepal and three in China. Both were published the same day. Neither is wrong so much as stamped at a different hour, which is what a count looks like while it is still being made.
What the two agree on is the second danger. The glacier collapse that appears to have started this left a lake of meltwater and debris sitting above the disaster zone, and the Nepali government spent Thursday warning that it could give way and send a second flood down. Beijing had flagged a high risk of rupture overnight. Xinhua said the lake could take in three million cubic metres over the following three days under continuing rain, presenting a high risk of breach and a major flood downstream.
By Friday a Chinese state outlet was saying the opposite, or nearly: the threat is diminishing, because the lake is overflowing naturally and emptying faster than it fills, and its level had dropped ten metres since Thursday morning. That is the claim of one state medium, relayed; no French outlet is in a position to check it.
In between, the water moved and the rescue stopped. A CCTV reporter at the scene said water had begun to spill from the lake toward the Gyirong border post, the worst-hit sector, and that every rescue team had been ordered to stay where it was and wait. Nearly 700 firefighters, with drones and search dogs, are deployed around Gyirong.
On the Nepali side the army sent two helicopters to help pull out about a hundred workers trapped in a tunnel at a hydropower site. The prime minister's office said 350 workers and residents had already been taken out of that spot, in conditions it called very risky and made harder by the weather and the flood. "Our priority remains the search and rescue of people," the army spokesman, Raja Ram Basnet, said; reception centres have been set up.
France's own stake in this is a number nobody has given. The defence minister, Sébastien Lecornu, confirmed that a certain number of French nationals are unaccounted for, and said France is ready to send help to Nepal and Tibet. He did not say how many. Of the missing overall, 517 are foreign nationals.
Why it is on the board
Top of Le Monde's most-read list when we collected, third on 20 Minutes' and fourteenth on BFMTV's — four of the 29 French items we held are this flood, including a Le Monde piece on what started it.
The four divide by distance from the water. Two are live pages that keep rewriting the toll. One is the explanation of the glacier and the landslide behind it. The fourth is the part that is French: which of its own nationals have not been heard from.
확인: 20 Minutes · BFMTV