Ten days into the search for those lost in Nepal’s devastating floods, rescuers made a discovery that overturned a family’s grief: Chandika Kumari Shrestha, an elderly woman her relatives had presumed dead, was still alive inside the ruins of her collapsed home in Betrawati. Convinced she had not made it, her family had already begun the rituals of mourning her “death.”
She had survived within a narrow pocket of air, hemmed in by water and mud, as her four-story house lay buried in the sludge left behind by the disaster.
The rescue unfolded on Saturday over roughly 45 minutes. Officers reached Shrestha in the cramped space where she was trapped and rushed her to a hospital. Police officer Mahendra Darnal, who took part in the operation, told Reuters that the crew had been searching around the wreckage when a plea reached them: “The four-storey house was swept (away) by the floods and the house was left in the middle of a quicksand. While walking around it, we heard a voice ‘save me,'” he said.
Darnal had been in contact with her relatives throughout, and by the time she was found they had moved on to grieving. “I was in touch with the family and they had started the 11-day mourning period,” he said.
Betrawati ranks among the hardest-hit places in Nepal. Whitish silt, nearly as firm as cured cement, swallowed the town’s marketplace and most of its houses, several of them four stories tall. The valley that funneled the floodwaters saw more than 1,300 people killed across the country, with thousands still unaccounted for. Five days before Shrestha’s rescue, Darnal said, 24 decomposing bodies had been recovered in the market area, in a building that once held a small shop.
Shrestha was one of hundreds reported missing in the town. Among those still unlocated is Filipino doctor Juan Carlos Manalo.
Eleven days after the glacier collapse that triggered the flooding, close to 5,000 people remain missing. Hundreds of bodies drifted toward riverbanks far from the stricken district of Rasuwa, and in Chitwan, hundreds of miles away, mass burials of unidentified remains have been carried out repeatedly.
Even as hope of finding anyone else alive fades, Nepali authorities are still combing the tunnels and the layers of hardened mud capping the buildings. Since Friday, three people have been extracted from those passages, among them a Chinese national found near the Trishuli River, where more than 900 people are believed to have been trapped.
Shrestha is not the only one to have emerged against long odds. An 8-year-old boy was reunited with his mother after being pulled from the debris.
