TRISHULI BAZAAR: Three days have passed since the last reported live rescue from Nepal’s flood-hit hydropower belt, while mud-filled tunnels remain the biggest hope for hundreds still missing. With 1,280 people confirmed dead and another 5,624 were unaccounted for across Nepal and Tibet – a combined 6,904 – experts fear the final toll could surpass the nearly 8,800 killed in the 2015 Gorkha earthquake.The last reported rescues from the hydropower belt came on Aug 31. Nepal’s national disaster risk reduction and management authority said in its 7pm update Thursday that 1,259 bodies had been recovered and 5,083 people remained missing.Across the border, China reported 21 deaths and 541 missing in Tibet, taking the official two-country count to 1,280 dead and 5,624 missing. But the Tibetan toll remained difficult to independently assess. Reporters Without Borders described the region as a “de facto information black hole”.Bijay M Bhattarai, secretary of Independent Power Producers’ Association, Nepal, told TOI that an earlier casualty projection relied “strictly on official state registries, tourist visa logs and formal corporate HR rosters” and therefore excluded “undocumented populations of riverbed squatter settlements, illegal sand miners and transient transport workers.” That gap mattered along Bhote Koshi-Trishuli corridor, where daily-wage loaders, miners, labourers, drivers and riverside settlers often lived outside formal employment or residence records, he said. A labour-rights organiser told TOI, “The Trishuli gorge doesn’t run on formal employment contracts.”