Rescuers in Nepal and China were still working on Saturday to find thousands of people who went missing after a deadly, tsunami-like wall of water and mud swept through the Himalayan region days ago, destroying entire villages.

The number of missing people has climbed close to 3,000, according to the latest figures from both countries. So far, 633 bodies have been recovered, and there are reports that some victims may have been swept downstream as far as India.

The area is home to large energy infrastructure projects. Nepal’s disaster authority added 933 hydropower workers to its missing persons list, which already included trekkers and pilgrims heading to Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash.

Those who managed to escape say they lost everything and now face a painful wait to learn what happened to their loved ones — with little left to rebuild their lives from.

“All the settlements near the river were swept away. There is nothing left,” survivor Buddhi Dangol told AFP.

Samjhana Thing said she had been waiting three days for news of her missing brother.

“We don’t know anything. Hopefully he is in a safe place,” she said.

‘Enormous’ Trauma

The Red Cross called the trauma of Wednesday’s catastrophe “enormous,” adding that as many as 93,000 people may have been affected. The death toll is expected to rise.

Emergency teams have been rushing to pull survivors out of affected zones, where food and water supplies are running out because of the widespread destruction.

The search has been complicated by fears of more flooding. The mix of ice and mud created huge lakes, and one of them now threatens emergency workers searching the region.

Nepali police urged all rescuers to “immediately move to a safe location” after receiving word that “a water dam has burst again on the Tibetan side.”

In Tibet — where Chinese authorities are the only source of information — Beijing paused its rescue operation at the hardest-hit area of Gyirong over the risk of renewed flooding, before later saying the threat had eased.

‘All Swept Away’

On the Nepali side of the border, the military located people trapped in the tunnel of the Trishuli 3A hydropower project and were working to find a way in.

“Two helicopters have been dispatched, but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” Army spokesman Raja Basnet told AFP.

Some 350 workers and residents have been brought to safety from the site so far, he added, but efforts were ongoing to rescue more than a hundred still trapped.

Workers rescued from other dam projects along the Trishuli valley described a disaster that unfolded with terrifying speed. Buddha Tamang said he survived only because he was inside a tunnel at his dam when the flood hit.

“The senior officers working on the other side, they were all swept away,” he told AFP, after being airlifted on Thursday following more than 24 hours stranded.

Nepal reported a death toll of 626 people on Saturday, with 2,426 people — including hundreds of foreigners — out of contact.

Across the border in Tibet, which is largely closed to foreign journalists, seven people died and 554 remain missing, according to state news agency Xinhua. Authorities said they had evacuated 555 stranded tourists and 499 Chinese residents from Tibet.

In India, officials said they had recovered seven bodies from rivers flowing out of Nepal, believed to be flood victims.

Scores of Hindu devotees from around the world are among the missing, many of whom were on a pilgrimage to Tibet’s Mount Kailash.

Sivaranjani Muthunathan was travelling by bus with 56 others toward the Chinese border when they got stuck in what they thought was a traffic jam.

“Then there was fog, smoke, something that seemed to suddenly engulf us,” Muthunathan, 46, told AFP, showing a phone video of a torrent surging toward her.

Around them, vehicles were swept away or buried under mud. “One by one, we also climbed out through the driver’s side,” before scrambling up a hill, she said.