KATHMANDU — Authorities in Nepal are warning residents to prepare for the possibility of additional flooding after more heavy rain, as officials in China continue to reveal the extent of the devastation on the Tibetan side of the border.

Five days after a glacier collapse unleashed enormous volumes of water and buried communities throughout the region in mud, rescue teams in Nepal were still facing major obstacles reaching some of the hardest-hit areas. Meanwhile, the scale of the disaster continued to become clearer.

“The disaster here is overwhelming,” Ferrin Cole, an operations director at the U.S.-based Crisis Response International, told NBC News on Sunday. “The flood that came down that mountain just wiped out cities. We’re going in as fast as we can to get people the help that they need.”

Cole said his team was preparing to assist survivors and search for people who remain unaccounted for, but warned that operating in the thick mud presented serious hazards.

“The longer that death and mud are together, diseases breed, and so we’re always just aware of that,” he added.

The State Department said Saturday that roughly 100 Americans are among those reported missing in Nepal and China’s Tibet region.

Nepal’s death toll has climbed to 752, while more than 2,500 people remain missing, including 592 foreign nationals, according to the country’s disaster agency. The Nepal Tourism Board said 261 foreign nationals have so far been rescued.

China has separately reported 16 deaths and 546 missing people in Tibet, among them 261 foreign nationals. Authorities have not established how many of those reported missing in the two countries may be the same individuals.

Families searching for missing relatives could be forced to wait a considerable amount of time for definitive answers. Many bodies were swept considerable distances downstream and recovered in extremely poor condition. Nepal’s morgues have been overwhelmed, while authorities are gathering DNA samples in an effort to identify victims and notify their families.

In Chitwan district, where numerous bodies have been recovered, police officer Anil Thapa told Reuters that “more than half” of the bodies found were “beyond recognition.”

“Many have no visible faces. In some cases, only hands or legs remain,” the officer added.

The rescue and recovery operation is facing another threat from a lake created by a landslide above a border checkpoint that is now overflowing. At the same time, additional rainfall has caused rivers in Nepal to rise, leading officials to issue new warnings for people living near waterways.

Nepal’s Flood Alert system reported Sunday that significant rainfall had been recorded across several watersheds in Gandaki Province and warned that water levels were “expected to rise.”

“Therefore, people living in riverside areas are requested to adopt caution,” it said on X.

For people already affected by the disaster, however, repeated warnings have become difficult to process as they continue to live under the threat of another flood.

“Sometimes they say a flood is coming, then we have to run again to higher ground, even at night. There is also rain,” Govind Shreshta, a resident of Galchhi, told Associated Press. “It’s really difficult for me. I have a 72-year-old father and 70-year-old mom. I must carry them and I am exhausted. It’s going on like this for those who are still alive.”

China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV reported Sunday that the disaster reflects a broader pattern of glacier-related catastrophes affecting the region. It said the avalanche reached China’s Gyirong Port only minutes after the event occurred.

“The disaster was caused by glacier instability resulting from the long-term effects of climate warming,” said Chinese state media.

“It struck suddenly, with a large peak flow, high speed, severe destructive force and a wide impact area,” the report added. “These are also new and significant characteristics of cryosphere-related disasters emerging across the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions.”

Scientists and analysts are expected to need more time to establish exactly what triggered the mudslide and flooding. However, climate change is increasingly being viewed as a potential contributing factor.

The Himalayan region, spanning Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, China and Afghanistan is considered one of the areas of the world most exposed to climate change. Temperatures there are increasing more rapidly than the global average, accelerating the loss of glaciers and potentially making an already disaster-prone landscape even more unstable. Flooding, landslides and earthquakes are all recurring hazards in the region.

The suspected collapse of a melting glacier generated such powerful ground movement that seismic monitoring equipment initially identified the event as a magnitude-4.4 earthquake.

The U.S. Geological Survey subsequently revised the estimate to the equivalent of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake. It also reported that another seismic event occurred about three hours later, measuring the equivalent of a magnitude-4.2 earthquake. According to the USGS, debris and floodwaters generated by what it described as a “slope failure” traveled approximately 62 miles.

“We will not be able to attribute 100% that this is because of climate change, because these changes have been happening” over a long period of time, Neera Shrestha Pradhan, an expert at Nepal’s International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, said on Friday. But climate change might be breaking a threshold, she said, and “maybe that might be one of the causes of this happening.”

Janis Mackey Frayer, Dawn Liu and Sunil Pandey reported from Kathmandu, Nepal. Freddie Clayton reported from London.If you want, I can also make this more dramatic and publication-ready, with a sharper news-style lead and shorter paragraphs while still preserving all quotes verbatim.