Roughly 90 Americans remain missing after devastating flash floods tore through the Nepal-China border region, leaving hundreds dead and triggering an urgent search for travelers who vanished while visiting the remote area.
The U.S. State Department said Thursday that three American citizens had been rescued and that no U.S. deaths had been confirmed. Many of the missing Americans were reportedly traveling toward Mount Kailash in Tibet, a sacred pilgrimage site for multiple religions.
Families across the United States have been desperately seeking information about relatives who were in the region when the floods struck. Missing Americans reportedly include residents of Virginia, Texas, Ohio and New York.
Among them is 45-year-old Venus Rajnikant Patel, an Indian-born U.S. citizen who recently relocated from St. Louis to Cincinnati.
Patel had spent approximately two years planning his pilgrimage and communicated with his family shortly before disaster struck. His brother said Patel showed relatives his hotel room on the Nepalese side of the border and expressed excitement about crossing into Tibet.
Jolene Gosha, a friend of Patel, said loved ones were devastated after realizing that his hotel was directly in the area struck by the floodwaters.
“We’re just hoping, hoping that by some chance he was able to climb his way out of it,” Gosha said, while acknowledging the increasingly grim circumstances surrounding his disappearance.
Another missing American, 72-year-old Long Island resident Jitendra Patel, had also traveled to the region as part of a Hindu pilgrimage to Mount Kailash.
His son, Sunny Patel, said his father contacted him through WhatsApp on Wednesday morning and reported that he had crossed the border into Tibet. After later seeing footage of the devastation, Sunny discovered his father had been in the area directly impacted by the flooding.
The family has not heard from Jitendra since.
The Isha Foundation, an India-based spiritual organization that also operates a U.S. campus in Tennessee, said 77 people traveling with its groups were at an immigration center in Gyirong, Tibet, when the flooding occurred.
Of those travelers, 22 were Americans affiliated with the organization, according to Leslie Crespi, a community liaison for the foundation’s U.S. campus. Three volunteers assisting the trekkers were also reportedly at the immigration center.
Crespi said officials communicated with the group’s coordinator at approximately 9:05 a.m. local time and learned that the travelers had arrived at the facility.
Just nine minutes later, at approximately 9:14 a.m., the flash flood struck.
Crespi described the missing travelers as being “like family” and said reaching the pilgrimage destination represented a lifelong dream for many of those who made the journey.
The catastrophe has also shaken Nepalese communities throughout the U.S. During a candlelight vigil in New York City, Long Island resident Tak Ruwali said numerous local guides from the disaster zone had also disappeared from contact, per Trending Politics.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that U.S. officials had communicated with Nepalese leaders and offered American assistance.
Trump said the United States would provide “anything they want” and estimated that approximately 50 or 60 Americans could be in the affected region, though he cautioned that officials had not yet completed a full accounting.
Search-and-rescue operations remain underway across the massive disaster zone, where damaged roads, communications systems and other infrastructure have complicated efforts to locate survivors.
For the families of the dozens of Americans still unaccounted for, the wait for information continues as rescue crews race to determine who survived the catastrophic flooding.
