Nuwakot woman pulled alive from a buried house 10 days after Nepal floods

A joint team of Nepal Police and the Armed Police Force pulled Chandika Kumari Shrestha from the upper floor of a four-storey house in Betrawati, Bidur Municipality-10, in Nuwakot district on Saturday. She had been trapped since the Bhotekoshi flood of 26 August. Local reports put her age at 60 or 64. She was found unconscious. A nine-member Armed Police Force crew made the extraction. A helicopter took her to the Nepali Army's Maithili Barracks in Trishuli. The Prime Minister's Office said she would be moved to Kathmandu if doctors asked for it.

The same day, the army said a joint team that included South Korean disaster specialists brought a Chinese worker out of a 225-metre stretch of the Apar Trishuli 1 tunnel. Images released by Chinese state television showed two rescuers carrying the man. He was flown out with a medic on board. That rescue followed Friday's extraction of Sanjay Shah, a mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, a mechanical supervisor, from the Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel after nine days. Shah told reporters he had chanted throughout the wait. Friday was Krishna Janmashtami.

The flood, which scientists have linked to a collapse higher in the catchment, has a death toll that Nepal Police and the disaster agency now put above 1,300. The missing figure has been printed at 4,898 and, in other briefings, around 5,000. About 900 workers are unaccounted for across 12 hydropower projects. Roughly 500 of them are thought to be inside tunnels. India has said 275 of its nationals remain missing, 49 of them on the Tibet side of the border. China has reported 31 dead and 531 missing in Gyirong county, just across the line.

Saturday's two live recoveries do not change those totals by much. They change the instruction to the crews. A person can survive 10 days in a trapped house and 10 days in a tunnel. That fact keeps machines and dogs on sites that would otherwise be reclassified as recovery. It also keeps families at the tape.

Betrawati sits on a river terrace that the flood buried. A four-storey house can leave an air pocket on the top floor even when the lower storeys are packed with mud. That is a cruel kind of luck. It is also a reason the police went back to a building that looked finished. The army spokesman's Saturday brief was short: a woman was alive in Nuwakot, and she was being flown.

Hydropower is Nepal's export bet and, this month, its grave. Tunnels concentrate labour in a tube with one way out. When a river jumps its bank, the tube becomes a trap. The three men taken out of Trishuli tunnels in two days were the ones close enough to an adit or a collapse face that a voice could still travel. Hundreds of others have not answered.

India and Nepal are already in a political argument about climate damage and compensation. The External Affairs Ministry in New Delhi said on Friday that climate change is a common challenge and that historical emitters must lead. Kathmandu wants a bill. The woman in Betrawati and the man in the Chinese tunnel are not parties to that note. They are the reason the search lists have not been closed.

Doctors will now say whether Shrestha's unconsciousness is dehydration, injury, or something that will not reverse. The barracks at Trishuli are a first stop, not a hospital of last resort. If she lives, her house will still be a mound. The flood does not give buildings back.

Nuwakot and Rasuwa are now a corridor of half-cleared houses and blocked roads. Crews will keep cutting into concrete because Saturday proved that a voice can still be under it. They will also start marking buildings that have been searched twice, so that the next 10-day survivor is not missed because a team thought the mound was done. That marking is unglamorous work. It is the only work that turns luck into a method.