About 90 U.S. citizens remained unaccounted for on Aug. 27, 2026, a day after catastrophic flash floods struck the border region of Nepal and Tibet. The U.S. State Department said it was not aware of any American deaths and confirmed that three citizens had been rescued.
Many of the missing people had travelled toward Mount Kailash in Tibet, a sacred destination for Hindus, Buddhists and other pilgrims. Families and friends used social media to circulate information about people they could no longer contact, including travellers from Virginia and Texas and a mother travelling with her 14-year-old daughter.
The Isha Foundation, a spiritual organisation based in India with a U.S. retreat centre in Tennessee, said 22 Americans associated with it were missing. Its groups had been returning from Mount Kailash. A foundation representative said 77 travellers and three volunteers were at an immigration centre in Gyirong, Tibet, when floodwaters hit. The last communication from their coordinator came at about 9:05 a.m. Nepal time, nine minutes before the reported impact.
Among those missing was Venus Rajnikant Patel, a 45-year-old U.S. citizen who had recently moved from St. Louis to Cincinnati. His brother said Patel called relatives shortly before the flood from a hotel on the Nepalese side of the border and spoke about his planned crossing into Tibet. Friends later realised the hotel was in the affected area.
Another missing American, 72-year-old Jitendra Patel of Long Island, had been travelling with a Hindu pilgrimage group. His son said Jitendra called on WhatsApp on Wednesday morning to say he had crossed into Tibet. Later messages did not reach him. The two men shared a surname, but the supplied report did not say they were related.
The uncertainty around individual cases reflected the wider disruption caused by the disaster. Floodwaters and debris swept through Gyirong Port and nearby Nepalese districts, damaging roads and communications. That made silence difficult to interpret: a person listed as unaccounted for had not necessarily been confirmed injured or dead.
U.S. President Donald Trump said officials had spoken with Nepalese leaders and offered assistance. His public estimate of 50 or 60 Americans in the area differed from the State Department's figure of about 90 unaccounted for, and he acknowledged that a full accounting had not been completed.
The State Department total was therefore the clearest official U.S. figure on the date. With three rescues confirmed, no known American fatalities and communications badly disrupted, families continued waiting for verified information while authorities worked to locate citizens across the cross-border disaster zone.
