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Two more people pulled alive
September 5, 2026
Rescue teams in Nepal freed a Chinese man from a hydropower tunnel and a woman from a house in Nuwakot on Saturday, 10 days after the floods.
Nepal generates over 90% of its electricity from hydropower, and the tunnels bored for those river projects run under the valleys struck by the Aug. 26 floods that killed at least 1,300 people.
Key facts
- Nepal's disaster management agency puts the toll from the Aug. 26 floods at 1,300 dead or more, with upward of 5,000 people still unaccounted for; a glacier collapse is seen as the likely trigger.
- The Nepal Electricity Authority gave the names of the pair: Sah, 30, a mechanical foreman whose home district is Saptari, and Maharjan, 45, who supervises mechanical work and had made the trip to the site from Kathmandu.
- Per Nepal's army, a combined crew of the country's military personnel and disaster specialists from South Korea brought the man out of a tunnel measuring 225 meters, roughly 740 feet, and his health was being assessed afterward.
- The Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal puts at 115 the number of them thought to be trapped inside the main tunnel.
- Nepali rescuers brought out two survivors, a Chinese man and a woman, in two distinct operations on Saturday, a full 10 days on from the floods that struck the country, while crews kept combing for thousands of people still missing.
CBC reports two separate rescues in Nepal on Saturday, 10 days after the floods, a Chinese man and a woman brought out alive while teams kept looking for thousands still missing. AP News reports that Nepalese military personnel worked alongside South Korean disaster experts to lift the man out of a tunnel running 225 meters (about 740 feet), and that doctors were checking his condition afterward. Citing a social media post from the prime minister's office, AP News also places him inside a hydropower tunnel, which brings to three the workers taken out alive at the Trishuli hydropower project.
CNN reports on the two Nepalese workers freed the day before, identified through the Nepal Electricity Authority as Sah, a 30-year-old mechanical foreman who came from Saptari district, and Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor who had traveled to the site from Kathmandu. CNN reports that the crews had almost nothing to guide them at the start and pieced a route together from satellite imagery, engineering drawings of the plant and terrain data, an account CNN attributes to Arnold Dix, a geologist advising the rescuers. Near the end, CNN reports, the explosives and heavy machinery were set aside and the rock and mud were moved by hand. The Guardian reports that Nepali police officers cheered as the woman emerged from a house whose lower floor lay under thick sludge. Reuters carries the tunnel rescue on the same terms, and The New York Times reports two men taken alive from mud-choked tunnels nine days after the flood, the same sequence in different words.
The figures line up across the coverage. AP News, CBC, The Guardian, CNN, Reuters and The New York Times all carry Nepal's disaster management agency saying at least 1,300 died in the Aug. 26 floods, with more than 5,000 still missing, and tracing the flooding to a likely glacier collapse. Settled are the rescues themselves, the toll as the agency gives it, and the turn CNN reports from searching for survivors to recovering the dead. Unsettled is the search, with CNN reporting the Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal's figure of 115 believed trapped in the main tunnel.
AP News carried the man's own account of the moment he was reached: “When they rescued me today, when they shone (the light) before my eyes, I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
Still developing
The record holds nothing left open about the tunnel and house rescues at the time of draft, and no account offers a different figure or framing.
How settled the reporting is
Sources
- CBC — Rescuers in Nepal pull 2 people alive from the debris 10 days after devastating floods - CBC
- AP News — Rescuers in Nepal pull 2 people alive from the debris 10 days after devastating floods - AP News
- CNN — ‘Don’t panic’: How two men were rescued from a flood-stricken Nepali power plant
- The Guardian — Rescuers in Nepal find two more people alive after flood disaster