Number of missing after Nepal flash floods jumps significantly to nearly 2,000

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Get more with BBC Podcasts wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription. Hello, I'm Sean Lay. Thanks very much for downloading the BBC's World Tonight podcast from Friday the 28th of August. after the flash flooding on the Nepal-Tibet border caused by glacier collapse. Where else in the world is at risk? With extra police drafted into Middlesbrough, we'll be examining a difficult week for local people sparked by last weekend's fatal head-on car crash on the A66 road.

0:49One of the town's local MPs, who was born in Middlesbrough, tells us what we need to know about his home. There's a new album of music by Prince and many fans are not happy. How should you handle the creative legacy of a dead artist? Two young Icelanders debate whether the country should start negotiating with Brussels about a possible bid to join the European Union. There's a referendum taking place on Saturday. And the Florida car salesman who sings opera to make his sales. The scale of Wednesday's flash floods on the border between Nepal and China-controlled Tibet is becoming ever clearer. The Red Cross says 93 ,000 people may have been affected by the disaster.

1:28That's an estimate of the total population in the affected region. The number missing has grown to nearly 2 ,000, still comparatively small but horribly pregnant with meaning for those anxiously waiting for news of a loved one. 586 bodies have been recovered, killed by the huge torrent of rock, ice and debris which surged down from the mountains, swelling and bursting existing rivers, swamping many communities in mud. Lila Peters-Yaheya is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Nepal. She's been visiting some of the affected area. We went down to the riverbank. So, you know, all the villages, we saw what was a market.

2:10The hardest part for me was when I heard the witness, you know, some people who survived. And they explained to me, they say, you know, we were on the other side of the riverbank and there were people on the market and we heard them screaming, when the big wave came and took them away. So what you see is unreal, actually. The level of destruction is just unreal. Well, the BBC's Azadeh Moshiri has been in Tushuli talking to some of the locals there caught up in this disaster. One of the people here desperate for news is Sujata Joshi. She tells me four of her family members are missing. Who in your family is missing?

3:02Her brother Sumit is here as well and he tells me when the flood hit his home he ran with his wife and his child. He survived. They were washed away. We were at home. When the flooding started, I rushed out. I asked my sister-in-law to hurry, but she was busy closing up our shop and got caught in the floods. Families in Nepal talking to the BBC's Azadeh Mishiri. It was around 9.30am UK time Friday that fire and rescue teams from Tibet and from Sichuan reached the border area. According to an official Chinese news agency, these are the first professional teams to arrive in the disaster area. This may in part explain why China had previously said only five people were known to have died in Tibet.

3:49On last night's programme, I mentioned that China was worried that some 3 million cubic metres of water, roughly equivalent to the water in 1 ,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools, would flow into an already dammed lake. Now, officials say that lake formed near the Zhirong Boider Crossing from the landslide debris. has broken its banks, prompting fears of a second flood. Tony Han from the BBC's Global China Unit gave me the latest. I have to stress that what we do have to go on is basically what the Chinese government is saying via state media. And the emphasis that they're putting on this situation is really to highlight the kind of scale and sophistication of the rescue efforts that they've mounted.

4:29For instance, the fact that they've sent at least 2 ,000 personnel into the area, that these people are equipped with fairly sophisticated equipment, including drones. Also kind of highlighting the undeniable bravery of some of the frontline rescuers who are basically carving a path towards the border post, which was the structure that we saw in the video that was being inundated by that wall of mud and pulverised rock. So that's really where the focus lies in terms of state media coverage. It's taken them, even by their own account, hasn't it, quite a long time to get to the main part of the disaster area on their side of the border.

5:09That's right. The main challenge really is for them to kind of forge their way down the valley that leads towards the border post to reach that kind of epicenter where the damage was at its worst. They've said that the road is essentially impassable and therefore they're trying a variety of other ways to reach that point, such as rubber dinghies or the first group that actually did reach that post. They essentially walked along the river at a higher elevation and then kind of lowered themselves down on ropes. And that happened more than 48 hours since the disaster itself. The Nepalese authorities say they've been informed by China that the lake on the Tibetan side of the border, which everybody was so worried about, this kind of lake was formed by the damming effect of all the debris that had come down, that the water level has now broken over that lake.

6:05Is there any official information about that? So they are providing some updates. What they said yesterday was that there was 2 million cubic metres of water in that temporary lake, and the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources said that it expected an additional 3 million cubic metres to flow into that lake. It was trying to model the effects, it said, although there hasn't been detailed information on what that modelling has shown, if it's taken place already. The government has also dispatched a team of experts onto the site to assess the location themselves. Time presumably is against them if the water is now starting to exceed it, if the Nepalese are right about that.

6:48Can I ask you finally about the casualty figures? The Chinese authorities said at the start is they thought five people were dead. That did sound remarkably low given the scale of what had happened. Is it any clearer yet on the Tibetan side of the border how many people may have lost their lives and how many people are missing? So the official figures are, as you say, that five people have died. There are 558 people missing by the official count. And of those people, 260 are foreign nationals. That comes through state media again. We have no way of independently verifying that. It is worth saying that, as we spoke about earlier, the rescue teams reached the sort of epicentre of the disaster today.

7:37It was this afternoon. And so it's possible that we might see those figures rise sharply over the coming days. That's Tony Han of the BBC Global China Unit. In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday's disaster, the first report suggested the floods had been triggered by an earthquake or a landslide. Satellites and other observations now suggest it was triggered by the collapse of part of a glacier high in the Nepalese mountains. Nepal is not the only part of the world where this kind of collapse has become an issue. Dr Alton Byers is a mountain geographer and research scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

8:15Dr. Byers, thank you for being with us on The World tonight. Thank you for having me. It's good to have your expertise, sir. Let's start with what happened on Wednesday. This discussion about potentially the permafrost and climate change. Can you explain a bit about why those two things are coming together potentially in such a dangerous way? Right. Well, basically, glacier and rock stability decreases with warming temperatures, and it makes glaciers and masses of ice and rocks less resistant to gravity. And that leads to breakages of large masses that we saw two days ago. Now, that begins the process of a cascading series of events that led to what we call a hyper-concentrated slurry glacier flood that resulted in the devastation downstream.

9:08So these are not limited to Nepal. They have been documented for countries all over the world. For example, in Peru, there was an event like this in Salkantai and the Cordillera Blanca in 2020. Another Lake Rasak in 2023. Nepal, we know of at least eight events during the last 15 years or so. Switzerland, the mountain blotting avalanche in May 2025. Alaska, the massive tsunami generated by the rock collapse in the Tracy Arm Fjord. I'm sure if you looked at the New Zealand Alps and Patagonia and Russian Altai, any glaciated mountain range in the world, you'd probably find similar processes going on.

9:53Because as the world has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1860, mountains have warmed as well. I suppose the worry is that process is now accelerating at a pace that makes it hard to prepare for. Absolutely. They seem to be increasing in frequency and in magnitude. Now, I suspect if you went back 50 years or so and looked at some of the events that happened then, there may have been linkages as well. But as you can see from my list, they do seem to be increasing in frequency. We have now a world that is covered by satellites from space, observing really pretty much every square inch of the planet, more or less.

10:38Is it possible to use technology to provide some kind of early warning system? I mean, these are natural disasters, but they start somewhere at a particular moment in time, don't they? Is it possible to develop anything or is research going on into developing anything that might help? Well, absolutely. I think that remote sensing satellite imagery has come a long way and it's quite useful and accurate now. It can be useful in identifying areas of risk. That could be, for example, overhanging ice that we want to keep an eye on or glacial lakes, other glaciers that are changing. And that can help us begin the process of developing early warning systems.

11:24I think that there could even be an early warning system developed for Tresoli and the villages that we saw so horribly destroyed two days ago. That is, if there were some mechanism that could alert people once the flood was detected. It took like an hour, hour and a half from the initial process for the flood to reach the villages. That's probably enough time, like the tsunami mechanisms in Hokkaido in Japan, to alert people who can then run up in escape routes. Get to higher land. Dr. Alton Byers, mountain geographer, research scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

12:10Thank you very much. Coming up on the program, we'll hear from two women in their 20s who sit on opposite sides of the Iceland-EU debate ahead of Saturday's referendum. The biggest reasons for joining the European Union for Iceland would be to adopt the euro. The euro is not the magic solution. Having an independent currency is a good thing for a small, open and natural resource-based economy. Stay with us for that discussion. A decade after the death of Prince, a new album has been released Friday from his extensive back catalogue, which stretched back for almost 40 years. Prince died without leaving a will and the last 10 years have been riven with disputes over his legacy.

12:50When it comes to the estates of dead pop stars, that's hardly unique. To talk about it, we brought together Andrea Svensson, who knew the singer, now hosts the official Prince podcast, and Jonathan Wingate, also a music journalist, who is David Bowie's spokesman. Andrea first, the album's called Timeless. She spent Friday listening to it. What's her verdict? There's a lot of highlights. I do have one overarching complaint that it feels a little random. But once you start listening to it and focusing on the individual tracks, there's some really good stuff in here. Particular tracks you'd single out?

13:24Well, I think a treat for me is I Am You, the opening track. It was something that Prince recorded back in 1977 when he was only 19 years old and working on his debut album. and it's been mixed so beautifully that you can really hear him playing all of these different instruments and having it come together to sound like a full band. I know a man's not supposed to cry But how could you do this to me? Oh, you just go stand there and watch me die I'm begging you please Go home One of the things that people may well know is that he had this extraordinary vault tucked away which contained hundreds of recordings.

14:10A vault I think only he had the passkey for Yeah, so very early on in his career, Prince was writing and recording way more music than he could possibly release. And, you know, his label Warner Brothers only wanted him to put out an album a year, but he was recording many albums each year. So over time, he amassed hundreds of unreleased songs in a literal vault at Paisley Park. They put a big bank vault door downstairs and he would walk the reels down there and throw them in this room. Eventually, that vault actually filled to the brim and the room leading up to the vault also started filling up with material.

14:48So when he passed away, it was just volumes upon volumes of material that had to be cataloged and properly archived. And somebody had to be able to get into it, presumably. They actually had to call a safe cracker to get into the vault because nobody besides Prince knew the combination. Wow. Do you understand why some fans are a bit kind of grumpy about the selection and just about the whole process in which his music is now being released? There is something befuddling about this release and the way it was curated. It's presented as the first album to span Prince's entire career, starting in 1977 and leading all the way up to 2016.

15:28But 10 songs and 41 minutes of music to represent this incredibly prolific artist who was recording every day and who, you know, in his lifetime released 39 albums. It just doesn't cut it. I want to bring Jonathan Wingate in at this point because Jonathan is a former spokesman for the late David Bowie and I think, Jonathan, you've also listened to this album. Does this feel like a kind of familiar argument with artists' estates? Actually, with artists when they're still alive sometimes with their record companies. It's a familiar argument and a familiar commercial tale. There are some good songs on here.

16:08The first four songs from I Am You, which is an outtake from his first record, and then it really tails off. Truth be told, I'm a huge Prince fan, but this is stuff that probably should have been kept in the vault. And you kind of wonder whether Prince left a lot of this stuff in the vault for a reason. It just seems a bit of a cheap, tacky thrown together compilation. and I know having worked with major artists in my time there was always this clamour for extra material extra tracks unreleased tracks and some of the big artists I've worked for in their lifetimes did not want this stuff going out there let alone when they had no control after they've left this mortal coil can you remember Bowie having this sort of concern during negotiations I had this constant conversation with David and we vetoed things all the time and didn't give them access to unreleased stuff because David thought if it wasn't good enough at the time why do I want to put out some substandard demo that didn't make it onto Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust.

17:14Andrea Swenson it's a very compelling argument but I wonder what factors you think a state should consider when releasing music. Afterwards Jonathan acknowledges it's a business. It is a business and I do think there is a way to package together unreleased material in a way that adds to someone's historical narrative. And I think that is really what's missing from this compilation. We don't know anything about any of these songs. There's no liner notes. There's no archival material included, not even a picture of one of the reels or anything. It just feels like they were stripped completely of context.

17:48But I do think that there's ways to package things together so that you get more out of what an artist was thinking and doing in a certain period. I mean, look at someone like Bob Dylan and all of his bootleg releases. There's been dozens of releases that have so many different recordings, and it really fills in these gaps in his creative process. A perfect example of that is Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.

18:22There were two recording sessions done for the album. And famously, the acoustic, ostensibly demos that he tried out were the ones that the fans loved from bootlegs, but a lot of them weren't usable because you could hear the button on his shirt clanging against his guitar as he played. So it was never released. But actually, the Blood on the Track's outtakes is far superior to the original album. Andrea, let me ask you finally, you knew Prince. I want to kind of just get your abiding memory of him and also what you think he would have made of the controversy. Well, Prince had a complicated relationship with both his label and his fan base, you know, and he changed his mind all the time.

19:04So I would never deign to say what Prince would think or do. But I do think that through his example of how hard he worked to be meticulous in his execution of every detail, I think he would be disappointed to see things that don't appear to have had that same amount of effort put into it. And I think that his sheer volume of creative output deserves a lot of care and attention and investment. And I just don't think we're getting that at this point in time. So that does feel very disappointing. Nothing left but a stone Stone Seems like we could work this out That is Andrea Svensson and Jonathan Wingate discussing the new album there that's from Prince called Timeless

20:07Listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription.

20:24You're listening to The World Tonight. If you're listening to us live, it's 26 minutes past 10. And if you're not, it's not. The main headline so far, 586 people are confirmed dead after the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday. Nearly 2 ,000 people are missing. Several people were reported being injured at a Christian festival in West Sussex where a sign collapsed and four men have pleaded guilty to setting fire to Jewish community ambulances in north-west London. Now, before we move on, here's a message from one of our contributors about what lies ahead. Coming up on the world tonight Here I'll sail cars There's more to come It's six days since the head-on car crash on the A66 outside Middlesbrough in which two police officers died along with five young men in the other vehicle Unsettled already, the town then learned that a woman and a seven-year-old girl died in a house fire Cleveland police have said the two incidents are not connected.

21:27Luke Meyer is the MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. Elected in 2024, he was born and brought up in Middlesbrough. Reflecting on this week's events there, I asked him first to describe the town he calls home. Middlesbrough is a unique place and we've got a pretty unique culture. And I think that, yes, we have some challenges. We have serious deprivation. We do have challenges with crime, which we've seen play out this week. but we also have a very special people and a very special place. One of the fastest growing tech sectors, for example. So we're very proud of our strengths and our resilience as a community too.

21:59And none of that disappeared last Saturday or over this week. You're in your 30s. What would you say has changed in your lifetime in Millerspray? So we've seen the impact of austerity on Teesside over the last 15 years and we've seen that in public services, policing. We're still sort of a net 200 officers down on where we were in 2010. But we've also seen the kind of long-term impacts of cuts to Sure Start, for example, and the number of young people have then come in to care as a result of that. But we've also seen a lot of strengths too. So the industrial kind of shift towards clean power, green industry, solar, carbon capture all scaling up.

22:40So we're at the foothills of an industrial renaissance in our region. It's been a long time coming, hasn't it? because I can remember back in the 1990s when Tony Blair's government was in office in the late 90s and in the 2000s. We heard a lot about the efforts they were making. They said to try and get something to replace steel. And yet it never really came off. And I wonder if some of the problems in Middlesbrough are much more deep seated than just a question of getting more funding for things like the police. Yeah, it's true. Teesside has really been kind of an economic relay race throughout the last 200 years, where it's had one sort of major industry that's kept the local economy afloat.

23:21So you mentioned steel, which was the key kind of industry to the early part of the 20th century, switched more towards petrochemicals. And so whenever one of those industries goes into a period of challenge, it has a knock-on effect on the whole region. And so this is why we're trying to scale up new industries like clean power today, We're at the end of what's been a very difficult week for Middlesbrough. How would you characterise the impact it's had on the people you represent, on the people you see day to day in the town? People across Teesside are still reeling from the tragic deaths of PC Tom Clough and PC Matthew Blades on Saturday and the various incidents we've seen in the days following.

24:02There is a lot of concern about that, but it's important to say that the vast majority of Teessiders are very proud of our emergency services. There's been a huge outpouring of support. And it's also worth saying, too, that much of the media reporting around some of the incidents we've seen on Teesside has not actually been accurate. I spoke to the chief constable today and she emphasised that some of the incidents that have been reported as being gang warfare are all unrelated, in fact, to the incident on Saturday and par for the course in terms of the challenges that they deal with here. So it's not accurate to say that, as one tabloid put it, that Teesside is a war zone, but it has been very challenging, certainly emotionally for our police force and for our community.

24:48An article published just at the start of the month on the Teesside Live website reported statistics suggesting Middlesbrough is now the most dangerous place to live in England and Wales. Over the previous 12 months, the amount of crime translated to a crime rate of 150 crimes per 1 ,000 people. We have been seriously impacted by austerity, it's true, but it's also worth emphasising the other side of the story on Teesside, which is the really positive stuff we've got going on in Middlesbrough. You're getting 200 extra officers for now, but that's really just a kind of temporary measure drawn in from other forces because of the problems there have been this week.

25:27Are you hoping things are going to settle down now? Yeah, I spoke to the Chief Constable today and she is extremely pleased with the outpouring of support, not just from the public, but from police forces across the country and the National Crime Agency too, which has seen, as you say, over 200 officers deployed to Cleveland. She is now confident that they have enough capacity and resource in the region to deal with the challenges that we have here. But as you say, long term, the challenge is making sure that we have sustainable funding for both our police force and our fire brigade too, both of which are penalised by these funding formulas that don't account for deprivation.

26:04That's my focus in Parliament when we return next week is to get those funding formulas changed so that we have long-term sustainability. That was Luke Myers, MP in Middlesbrough. A decade after Iceland broke off negotiations to join the European Union, they could be back on again if a consultative referendum on Saturday approves. But it would only be to start talking about a possible future application to join rather than making a formal application now. Here's tonight's top headline on the national broadcaster, RUV.

26:44It's reporting big cues today in Reykjavik, the capital, as people line up for early voting. Iceland is one of a small group of European nations. Norway and Lyshjöin are the others, which are part of the European Free Trade Agreement. But being in the EEA means accepting EU-made rules of which they have no influence. Iceland is also part of the Schengen Agreement, allowing citizens to travel freely throughout the 27 EU member countries. But something has unsettled the country's small population, the mood music from Washington. Iceland was a founder member of NATO, but it has no army of its own, and as a result has depended on the protection of being part of a big Western military alliance umbrella.

27:26But Donald Trump's threats over Greenland, its vast neighbour to the north-west, have left Icelanders also concerned. We brought together two 20-somethings to talk about Saturday's referendum. Magnir, now Johanna's daughter, is a deputy member of Reykjavik City Council. She plans to vote no. And Thorhilda, David's daughter, Sörbeck, is vice-chair of pro-European Icelandic Youth, who plans to vote yes. Ask Thorhilda first how important Saturday's referendum is to her. I think it's just extremely important, not just for me, but for all Icelanders. So I think this is kind of a way to close this democratic cycle.

28:05The government is giving the voice back to the people. So I think the referendum is extremely important in just a democratic sense. Magnir, for you, as someone who opposes Iceland ever joining the EU, or certainly in the current circumstances, what does Saturday mean to you? Well, I agree with Thorilta. I think it's important that we get to vote on whether we should start negotiations with the European Union. It is a question on how our constitutional rights are, where the decisions are being made, where the final word is. And that's, of course, very important for the next generation. You're both comparatively young.