There’s no afraid about it. It’s simply the nature of natural disasters. Anyone searching for survivors of something that large and violent is just wasting time and effort.
There are two factors: how likely anyone is to be left alive at all, and how long they can survive w significant injuries. It’s been 3 days and 3 nights since the flood. Anyone who was miraculously only mildly injured but is trapped somehow so can’t self-rescue has since died of exposure after 3 cold wet nights.
If you don’t find them as walking wounded in the first few hours, they’re dead, or as good as dead. All of them.
It’s a human tragedy, but it’s also a reminder of how much the Earth cares for the affairs of humanity. Not one whit.
No. Look at any of the big natural disasters in the U.S. such as the Hawaiian wildfire or the Texas Hill Country flood. There were large numbers of missing which turned out not to be dead. What happens is that missing people turn up alive–but no one updates the database; that there are duplicate entries of the missing (more than one person reports them missing and they are entered under slightly different names), or a simple lack of communications–particularly in an area like Nepal.
And as to your comment people couldn’t survive in the cold weather, they are not all there:
Days After Nepal Flood, Rescuers Bore Through Tunnels to Try to Reach 900 Missing Workers: The Nepal Army, which is leading rescue efforts, turned to the trapped workers more than a day after the flood, according to army officials, industry groups and private rescuers.
Bright Angel Creek has been subject to flash floods since last year’s fire on the North Rim (the one that destroyed the lodge). Forests burn, soils lose their ability to quickly absorb water, and a thunderstorm comes along to drop a whole lot of water in a little bit of time and create a flood once several creeks merge their abundant extra water together.
But the area is intended as a wilderness area, where hikers are expected to keep aware of potential dangers around them, and where there are no permanent residents and precious little infrastructure to be damaged. A lack of warning system is in many ways a feature, not a bug, of this kind of wilderness experience.
(Also, I should note that the canyon that Bright Angel Creek runs through is the route of the North Kaibab trail. The Bright Angel trail that is referenced in the article as the most traveled trail in the park actually runs down from the South Rim, and the flash floods were nowhere near that trail.)
Has the cause been definitively determined? I’m reading somewhat vague reports about a glacial lake or dam that built up, possibly from a rockslide.
But the amount of water released all at once is absolutely staggering. This had to have taken some time to build up. Maybe a dumb question, but with the scale of this, wouldn’t this massive new lake have caught someone’s attention? Geologists, a huge new lake visible from satellite or aerial photos?
As it why it didn’t catch someone’s attention, it happened in a remote area, satellites only pass over periodically (and there is a delay before someone looks at the satellite images) and the water buildup might only have been several hours.
All that churning violence certainly adds a lot of heat to the flow.
I wonder if there were any natural lakes or lakes behind dams along the way. Which would get entrained in the debris flow as the flow essentially scours out a lake and/or tears down the dam holding it back.