Source Aljajeera
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Ten days after a devastating glacier collapse triggered catastrophic flooding across the Himalayas, rescue teams have miraculously pulled two survivors from the wreckage in Nepal.
On Saturday, search and rescue personnel freed a Chinese hydropower worker from a flooded tunnel and dug a 64-year-old Nepali woman out from under the thick sludge of her collapsed home.
The Chinese national, identified as Luhaitao, was located 225 meters (738 feet) inside a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project. He was extracted by a joint team comprising the Nepali military and South Korean disaster experts. After surviving in the darkness for more than a week, Luhaitao was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu for a comprehensive health assessment. In an audio recording released by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, he recounted his desperate attempts to shout for help every time he saw the faint lights of search crews, stating he “couldn’t believe it” when a rescue beam finally swept over him.
In a separate operation in the Nuwakot district, a 64-year-old Nepali woman named Chandika Kumari Shrestha was found unconscious but alive inside her mud-buried home in Bidur Municipality-10. Members of Nepal’s Armed Police Force managed to dig her out of the debris before she was airlifted to Kathmandu for urgent medical treatment.
The rescues offer a rare glimmer of hope following the August 26 disaster, which was triggered when a glacier on Mount Langtang Lirung fractured at an altitude of approximately 5,200 meters. The fracture unleashed a tsunami-like wall of water, rock, and ice down the valleys. The disaster has devastated the region, leaving more than 1,300 people dead and over 5,000 still missing across Nepal and the adjoining regions of China.
The scale of the destruction has severely impacted Nepal’s infrastructure, particularly its energy sector. Around 900 workers remain unaccounted for across a dozen hydropower projects in the flood’s path, with roughly 500 believed to still be trapped inside underground tunnels. Luhaitao’s recovery brings the number of workers pulled alive from the Trishuli projects to three, following the rescue of two Nepali workers earlier in the week.
As international disaster response teams continue to search alongside Nepali forces, authorities remain hopeful that more survivors might still be found in isolated air pockets amidst the wreckage.
