A third worker has been pulled alive from a Nepal hydropower tunnel, 10 days after catastrophic flooding hit the region.
Rescuers in Nepal have pulled another survivor alive from a hydropower tunnel, a Chinese national who had been trapped for 10 days following deadly flooding. He’s now the third worker rescued from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project.
The man was pulled from a 738-foot tunnel and is currently undergoing a health assessment. Footage from the rescue showed him barely able to walk, being carried by soldiers to a waiting helicopter, where an army medic began checking him.
Two others were found alive just a day earlier
Two other workers were pulled from the same tunnel network the day before. CNN identified those two men as Sanjay Sah and Kabir Maharjan.
Around 900 workers remain unaccounted for across 12 hydropower projects in Nepal, with roughly 500 believed to be trapped inside tunnels specifically.
The rescues come nine days after catastrophic flooding hit Nepal on August 26, likely triggered by a glacier collapse that devastated towns and valleys across the region. According to Nepal’s disaster management agency, at least 1,259 people have been killed, and more than 5,000 remain missing.
Nepal’s communication minister, Bikram Timilsina, said officials haven’t given up hope of finding more survivors.
“We are waiting for the rescue of more and more people,” he wrote on Facebook.
China also reported earlier this week that 21 people were killed and 541 remain missing on the Tibet side of the border.
Finding third survivor beacon of hope for exhausted rescue team
Arnold Dix, a tunneling expert invited by Nepali authorities to advise on the Trishuli 3A rescue operation, described Friday’s rescue as a genuine turning point for the broader effort.
“We’ve found two people alive, so that gives us hope,” he told The Guardian. “After more than a week, everyone’s exhausted, but this spurs us on to try even harder, and it now also gives us focus for how we might approach other rescues in other locations. We now have proof that people can survive this long.”
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