Kathmandu (GNP): Rescuers in Nepal pulled a Chinese national alive from a tunnel buried under debris on Saturday, marking a renewed push by emergency teams searching for missing people 10 days after catastrophic flooding struck the region. A joint rescue team made up of Nepal Army personnel and foreign experts recovered the man from 225 metres inside a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project in Rasuwa district, according to a military statement.
A photograph released by the army’s Facebook page showed the survivor, identified only as Luhaitao, with his arms around two camouflage-clad rescuers, alert but with his hands covered in thick mud. The army said his health is currently being assessed while search and rescue operations continue at the site.
Luhaitao was among hundreds of hydropower workers reported missing after a tsunami-like wall of water and mud swept through the China-Nepal border following a massive glacial and rock collapse on August 26.
His rescue follows a similar breakthrough a day earlier, when two Nepali hydropower workers were pulled alive from the Trishuli 3A tunnel, an operation rescuers described as a miracle after the men had spent nine days trapped by the flood before being taken to hospital in stable condition. Searches are continuing across multiple sites, with at least 12 hydropower projects destroyed by the disaster.
The overall scale of the disaster has continued to grow as recovery efforts proceed. So far, 1,344 bodies have been recovered in Nepal, according to the national disaster agency, with around 5,000 people still missing. In China, state media have reported 31 people killed and 531 missing, bringing the combined death toll to 1,375 people and pushing the number of missing above 5,500.
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Army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet said work remains underway at the tunnels to locate any further survivors, after the government had earlier estimated that more than 100 workers could still be alive inside multiple blocked tunnels. Experts from India, China, Australia and South Korea have joined Nepali rescuers in the search, reflecting the scale of the international response the disaster has drawn.
With morgues overwhelmed by the number of dead, Nepal Police said on Saturday that around 1,030 bodies had been buried in mass graves after DNA samples were collected for future identification.
Amid the ongoing recovery effort, Prime Minister Balendra Shah has pledged to provide safe and comfortable accommodation for the thousands of people displaced by the disaster and currently living in temporary relief camps, acknowledging in a Friday social media post the difficulty of camp conditions while promising to help residents rebuild their futures.
Balendra Shah said, “We know that staying there is not easy for you.”
