Nepal: Chinese national extracted alive from tunnel, nine days after deadly flood

Nepalese emergency services managed on Saturday to extract a third person, of Chinese nationality, from a tunnel in the north of the country where he had been held prisoner since the deadly flood of August 26, we learned from the army.

“A Chinese national has just been taken out of a tunnel,” army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet told AFP, without further details. On Friday, two Nepalese workers had already been extracted alive from a tunnel buried under mud, the first since the disaster.

Rescuers are continuing their efforts on Saturday to try to locate other survivors in the tunnels of northern Nepal where they found two workers stranded the day before since the deadly flood of August 26, we learned from the army.

“Search and rescue operations continue this morning. Efforts are also underway in the tunnels (...) we have no new information, but the work continues,” a spokesperson for the Nepalese army, Raja Ram Basnet, told AFP.

“I couldn’t escape alone”

Nine days after the disaster, two Nepalese workers - Sanjay Sah, 30, and Kabir Maharjan, 45 - were extracted safely on Friday from a tunnel at the Trishuli-3 dam construction site in which they were prisoners.

“There were at least 40 or 45 of us” at the time of the flood, Mr. Sah said in a video published by Nepalese media. “I couldn’t run away alone (...) I told them all to run. I didn’t have time to go out.” Just after the disaster, the Nepalese authorities estimated the number of workers likely to be stuck in this tunnel at around a hundred.

For ten days, dozens of Nepalese rescuers, assisted by experts from India, China and South Korea, have been tirelessly digging several of these tunnels on sites of hydroelectric power stations and dam sites, buried since the flood. Apart from the two survivors extracted on Friday and the one this Saturday, their teams only found a few lifeless bodies.

The immense wave of water, ice and debris, caused by the collapse of a glacier and rocks, which swept across the border of Nepal and China, left at least 1,325 dead and nearly 5,600 missing, according to the latest official reports. Among the missing people are more than 900 employees or workers of Nepalese hydroelectric sites.