Nepal rescues 2 more from floods as 900 workers remain missing

Ten days after a glacier collapse sent catastrophic floods through Nepal, rescue teams pulled a man alive from a hydropower tunnel on Saturday—a moment of fragile hope in a disaster that has claimed at least 1,300 lives and left more than 5,000 people unaccounted for. The man, extracted from a 738-foot tunnel at the Trishuli 3A hydropower plant by a joint team of Nepalese military personnel and South Korean disaster experts, became the third worker rescued from that single project. Two other workers had been freed the day before.

The man's account of his rescue carried the weight of ten days underground. When the rescue team's lights first pierced the darkness, he said, he shouted repeatedly—but his voice could not reach them through the debris and distance. He kept calling out, waiting, until the team finally broke through to where he was. "When they rescued me today, when they shone the light before my eyes, I couldn't believe it," he told an officer, his words captured in audio shared by Chinese state media. Helicopter footage showed him being evacuated, an army medic attending to him during the flight. By Saturday evening, he was in stable condition at a hospital.

The same day, rescuers found a woman alive in Nuwakot town, buried under mud in what remained of a house. Photographs released by Nepal's army showed her covered in silt, rescuers offering her bottled water before wrapping her in a gray blanket and airlifting her to Kathmandu. Two separate rescues, two small victories against a catastrophe still unfolding.

But the scale of the crisis extends far beyond these three survivors. Across twelve hydropower projects scattered throughout Nepal, approximately 900 workers remain missing. Of those, authorities believe roughly 500 are trapped inside tunnels—sealed off by collapsed structures, debris, and the violence of water that moved through the mountains on August 26. Specialized rescue teams from India, China, South Korea, and the United States have mobilized to search through the wreckage, moving methodically through tunnels and damaged infrastructure, looking for signs of life.

The floods themselves remain a disaster of staggering proportions. The August 26 event, likely triggered by a glacier collapse high in the mountains, killed at least 1,300 people across Nepal. The official missing count stands at more than 5,000, though that figure carries the uncertainty of a country still accounting for its dead. The hydropower projects—infrastructure meant to generate electricity for a developing nation—became death traps when the water came. Workers who were underground when the floods hit found themselves in sealed chambers, cut off from the surface, dependent entirely on rescue teams who must navigate through unstable tunnels and debris fields to reach them.

The rescue operations represent one of the most complex challenges facing Nepal's disaster response. The tunnels themselves are hazardous even under normal conditions; flooded, partially collapsed, and filled with debris, they demand specialized equipment and expertise that only international teams possess. The coordination between Nepalese military personnel and foreign disaster specialists reflects the scale of resources required—and the acknowledgment that this crisis has outpaced what any single nation can manage alone.

For the families of the 900 missing workers, each rescue carries a double weight: relief that survival is possible, and the grinding uncertainty of not knowing whether their loved ones are among those still trapped, or among those already lost. The rescue efforts will continue through the tunnels and across the debris fields, but the mathematics of the disaster—900 missing, 500 believed trapped, three rescued so far—suggests that the coming days will bring far more loss than salvation.