More than 900 workers — including at least 85 Americans — are missing after catastrophic flash floods buried a dozen hydropower projects in Nepal, and the Nepali government initially balked at accepting foreign rescue help while oxygen runs out for those trapped underground.

The death toll from last Wednesday's ice-and-rock avalanche and resulting floods has surpassed 900 across Nepal and Tibet, with over 4,400 still missing. About 500 workers are believed trapped in massive tunnels built to control water flow at hydropower sites in Nepal's Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts. Six days in, hopes are fading. "Some might have suffocated," said Mohan Kumar Dangi, president of Nepal's Independent Power Producers' Association, according to AP News.

Here's the part the establishment press buries: Nepal's government hesitated to let foreign rescue teams in. Bhim Gautam, CEO of the same power producers association, told NPR that industry leaders had to "pressure the government" to approve rescue teams from China, India, and Australia. "It is so late now," Gautam said. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle pushed back, insisting assistance was accepted "according to the needs on the ground." Meanwhile, 85 Americans are among the missing, per the State Department.

The tunnels are enormous — "big enough to drive trucks through," geoscientist Jakob Steiner of the University of Graz told AP News. Some trapped workers may still have oxygen access, but time is running out. Rescuers at the Upper Trishuli-1 project, where at least 576 people are missing, have been blasting through debris. About 250 were rescued from that site over the weekend; 42 more are thought to still be inside. At the Chilime plant, rescuer Ashish Gurung described chest-deep mud and grim discoveries: "Inside that far ... it looked like it was just bodies," The Guardian reported.

The floods wiped out roughly 700 megawatts of generating capacity — about 10% of Nepal's entire power supply. More than 40 bridges are destroyed. India and China are sending prefabricated truss bridges; China has mobilized over 2,100 rescue workers, according to CCTV. But Chinese state media, AP News noted, has focused almost entirely on the official response, with little information about victims on the Chinese side.

NPR and The Guardian both noted that some experts linked the disaster to climate change. Fine — but that framing skips the more immediate question: who funded these hydropower boondoggles in a seismically volatile mountain corridor, and why are American lives and dollars tangled up in them? These are the kinds of globalist infrastructure projects that international development banks love to underwrite with other people's money — including, indirectly, American taxpayers — while our own grid crumbles and our power infrastructure ages past its expiration date.

Eighty-five Americans are missing in tunnels half a world away, built to light up someone else's country. The question isn't just whether rescuers reach them in time. It's what American interests were doing there to begin with — and what we got back besides a body count.