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Rescuers pull a Chinese worker
September 6, 2026
Emergency teams in Nepal rescued a Chinese man from a hydropower tunnel and a 64-year-old Nepali woman from a buried house, 10 days after flash floods struck the country.
Flash floods on Aug. 26, likely set off by a glacier collapse, tore through riverside communities in Tibet and Nepal and buried about a dozen hydropower plants where hundreds of workers were on site.
Key facts
- Nepal’s disaster management agency attributed the Aug. 26 flooding most likely to a collapsing glacier, and put the number of people still unaccounted for in the country at close to 4,900.
- On Saturday, Prime Minister Balen Shah of Nepal put the number pulled out of hydropower projects at close to 300.
- The death toll from the flooding stands at 1,375 or higher, with upward of 5,000 people unaccounted for, figures attributed to Nepal’s disaster management agency.
- The search has centered on a dozen hydropower projects around Nepal, where roughly 900 workers are unaccounted for and an estimated 500 of them are believed to be inside large tunnels.
- Two separate operations by emergency responders brought out a Chinese man and a Nepali woman, while the search for thousands of missing people carried on 10 days after the flooding struck Nepal.
AP reports that the rescued Chinese worker was taken to a hospital in stable condition, and that a relative described the outcome as luck inside a misfortune. AP also reports that the man went to Nepal for work in February with a fellow villager, his first job abroad, and that a relative could only follow news passed around a mutual aid group for families of the missing. The Guardian reports that Nepali army personnel and South Korean disaster experts pulled the man from a 225-metre tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project, and that he was undergoing a health assessment. Reuters carries the same rescue in its coverage of a Chinese national freed from a Nepal tunnel 10 days after the flood.
The second rescue lines up across the record as well. The Guardian reports that the woman, 64, was pulled from a damaged house in Nuwakot, the lower half of it sunk in thick sludge, and that police officers cheered as she came out. The New York Times carries the same rescue in its account of a woman found alive inside a house the floods buried. NPR reports the wider operation around both cases, with roughly 21,000 Nepali security forces and rescuers at work, nearly 300 people already brought out of hydropower projects, and tunnel specialists arriving from India, China and South Korea. NPR also reports a survivor describing boulders and mud driven into his tunnel, and anger among Nepalis who believed the government first waved off foreign help.
The rescues themselves are corroborated across every account. The casualty figures are not aligned in the same way. One account puts the dead above 1,000 and the missing at some 4,000, another puts the dead at least 1,375 with more than 5,000 missing, and another counts nearly 4,900 missing, with the accounts drawing on official tallies taken at different points in the search. What is settled is that two people came out alive on day 10, at the Upper Trishuli-1 project and in Nuwakot.
Speaking about the rescue, she said, “It’s a stroke of sheer luck amid the misfortune,” according to the account.
Still developing
The search for the workers still missing in the hydropower tunnels is reported the same way in every account, and nothing in the record as of the draft cuts against it.
How settled the reporting is
Sources
- apnews.com — Nepal flood survivor’s family in China relieved after days of anxious waiting
- NPR — A week after the deadly floods in Nepal, rescuers work to find survivors
- The Guardian — Rescuers in Nepal find two more people alive after flash flood disaster