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The United States announced more than $3.6 million in humanitarian aid Saturday for Nepal, a Himalayan nation bordering China and India, including emergency food assistance for up to 10,000 flood-affected households.
'There is no higher priority for us than the safety of American citizens. Our embassies in Nepal and China are working closely to assist Americans and support disaster relief efforts,' the State Department said in a statement.
Part of a glacier near Langtang Lirung in the Himalayas collapsed Wednesday, sending a mass of ice, rock and debris into a river and triggering catastrophic flooding along the border between Nepal and Tibet, the Chinese autonomous region that sits north of the Nepalese border.
The landslide registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, detected by monitoring stations in the United States and Germany. The US Geological Survey said the landslide generated the signal rather than an earthquake.
The floods have devastated communities in Nepal's Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha and Chitwan districts, killing at least 675 people and prompting large-scale search and rescue operations for nearly 3,000 people, including foreign tourists.
About 100 of those unaccounted for are Americans. Scientists studying the region have said glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating rapidly due to rising temperatures, a factor they say contributed to the collapse.
Of those reported missing in Nepal, 589 are foreign nationals, according to the country's disaster management agency. The Nepal Tourism Board said it has rescued 261 foreign nationals so far.
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