A California tech worker has been named as the latest American missing in the devastating Nepal floods that have killed at least 530 people and left over 1,500 people unaccounted for.
Prabhath Sajeepa, 48, has been confirmed as one of the 90 missing Americans unaccounted for after a catastrophic flood engulfed the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday.
His family is now desperately seeking answers. Sajeepa’s brother, Praneeth Kumar, shared his information on Facebook, adding that his family has not had any contact with him since the disaster.
Sajeepa was traveling with the Isha S3 group, a spiritual group led by guru Jaggi Vasudev.
His niece, Kavya Koulagi, told the BBC that Sajeepa had been involved with the foundation for years. ‘It has been terrible. I hope he is somewhere safe,’ she said.
‘We are hoping for good news.’
Vasudev said in a video on his YouTube channel that 80 members of the group were unaccounted for after the flood, calling it a ‘terrible and extraordinary event.’
The Isha Foundation said on social media that one of their groups had been caught in the flood while at the immigration office.
Prabhath Sajeepa, 48, a tech worker from California, has been named as one of the Americans unaccounted for in Nepal
A catastrophic flash flood tore through the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday, resulting in hundreds of fatalities and thousands of missing people. Pictured above is the destruction in Nuwakot
Sajeepa was traveling with the Isha Foundation. He was among 80 members who were at the immigration center when the flood struck
They shared a bone-chilling video of dozens of people fleeing the building just seconds before a massive flood engulfed the area with mud, dust and rocks.
Kumar, Sajeepa’s brother, said on social media that his last known location was near the Gyirong immigration port area.
Sajeepa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works as a technical director at Pure Storage, according to his LinkedIn profile.
His family is among the hundreds searching for information about their family members missing in Nepal.
No American deaths have been confirmed as of the latest update, while three US citizens had been rescued.
Ashna and Shreya Ahuja have been pleading for updates on the whereabouts of their parents, Deepak and Madhu Ahuja, who had been traveling in the area to visit the sacred Mount Kailash.
‘We hope that they have been found and are at a hospital and are safe,’ Ashna told CNN. ‘The latest honestly hasn’t changed too much in the past two days.’
‘We are still reaching out to both officials at the Beijing embassy, Kathmandu embassy, and speaking to people on the ground there to see what the efforts are looking like to rescue and save our parents, hopefully.’
But, she conceded, they had received little ‘concrete information.’
Sajeepa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works as a technical director at Pure Storage, according to his LinkedIn profile. His family is looking for answers on his whereabouts
New Yorkers Ramesh Sharma, 65, and his wife Neelam, 64, are also missing after traveling to the region for their own Mount Kailash pilgrimage.
Their daughter, Dr Radhika Sharma, said the journey was her parents’ first vacation alone since retiring last year.
‘My parents have been wanting to do this for a while,’ she previously told the Daily Mail.
‘They had retired last year, and they just started traveling and really living their life.’
The family believes Ramesh and Neelam were near the border at around 8am – about one hour before the flooding – but has been unable to determine what happened next.
‘We don’t know why they were delayed,’ Radhika said. ‘We are hoping that they made it to the Tibet side.’
Deepak and Madhu Ahuja traveled from Texas for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mount Kailash before disappearing amid the catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border
Ramesh and Neelam Sharma, a New York couple pictured above, are unaccounted for after the Nepali floods
Nepali police shared on Friday morning Eastern Time that authorities were ‘continuously working on bodies collection, identification, muchulka (legal documents/death deeds) and necessary disaster management.’
The department posted several heart-wrenching photos of the destruction and emergency responders pulling survivors from the rubble.
The historic flooding has destroyed multiple towns and already claimed hundreds of lives, with the death toll expected to rise as search efforts continue.
The devastating sequence of events came just after 8.30am local time, when the earth started shaking along the Nepal-China border.
The US Geological Survey initially detected the shaking as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake, but later determined that a gigantic chunk of a glacier had collapsed.
The United States Geological Survey called the seismic event an extremely powerful ‘glacial collapse and debris flow that caused subsequent catastrophic impacts downstream.’
As the chunk plummeted, the wall of ice was pulverized into a terrifyingly fast-flowing mix of freezing water that swept up debris and rocks from the side of the mountain into the Lende Khola River.
Scientists initially believed the shaking was due to an earthquake, but have now determined it was a chunk of a glacier that ravaged countless communities
Disaster crews have been responding since. Pictured above is a family rescued by the Nepal Army
Bishal Nath Upreti, a geologist and academic at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, called the disaster a ‘tsunami from the sky,’ which has now ‘completely wiped out’ communities.
Terrifying footage of the flash flooding revealed enormous plumes of dirt and fast-flowing water quickly hurtling through villages as onlookers ran for their lives.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump said that the US had offered Nepal whatever assistance it needed.
‘We are sending aid and we’ve spoken to the leadership,’ Trump said. ‘And we let them know anything they want, we’ll have.’
