A survivor was pulled alive from a tunnel by a joint Korean-Nepali rescue team a full 10 days after massive floods struck Nepal. The site where the survivor was found is the same workplace where nine missing Korean nationals had been employed.
Nepali army spokesman Raja Ram Basnet said on the 5th that rescuers "rescued one Chinese national from a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli (UT)-1 hydropower plant construction site" in the Rasuwa district of Bagmati Province in the north-central part of the country. The Upper Trishuli hydropower construction site is where nine Korean employees of Doosan Enerbility and Korea South-East Power went missing.
A joint rescue team made up of Nepali soldiers and Korean disaster experts found the Chinese man, Lu Haitao, 225 meters inside the tunnel, the army said. Lu was discovered at about 1:20 p.m. that day in the No. 4 construction access adit of the UT-1 hydropower plant. The location was about 225 meters in from the tunnel entrance. The Korea Disaster Relief Team (KDRT) also announced that day that it had rescued one Chinese survivor from a tunnel near the plant's upper weir dam. The rescue marks the ninth person saved by KDRT since its establishment in 2007. The team rescued eight people during the 2023 earthquake in Turkey.
Video released by KDRT shows a faint human figure inside a vast tunnel lined with steel reinforcement columns. The urgent voices of rescuers can then be heard shouting, "Survivor. ARE YOU OK?" and "We found a survivor."
According to the Associated Press and China Central Television (CCTV), Lu said he shouted with all his strength whenever he saw the rescuers' lights in the distance, and that the distance appeared to have kept his voice from reaching them. He added that when rescuers came and found him that day, he could hardly believe it. Lu reportedly said one more person had been nearby, but rescuers said they could not confirm whether that person was alive. Based on Lu's account, KDRT plans to conduct additional search and rescue operations in the UT-1 hydropower plant tunnel on the morning of the 6th in consultation with the Nepali army.
Rescuers also recovered six unidentified bodies at the plant that day. KDRT said it found one body of unknown nationality at the site.
Crawling Through Mud to Get Inside, With Water Waist-Deep in Places
KDRT rescuers, dispatched to Nepal on the 2nd, are fighting daily to save even one more person. Footage of Lu's rescue shows the team crawling across mud flats to push deeper into a section of tunnel filled with silt. Another video shows rescuers wading through waist-high river water as they searched.
KDRT is continuing to search the area around the UT-1 hydropower plant by helicopter and drone in an effort to locate the missing Korean workers. A KDRT official said the team would keep searching tomorrow, including the tunnel near the UT-1 weir dam, the powerhouse where the plant's turbines are located, and the area around the Yellow Bridge.
Massive floods that began upstream in the Himalayan mountains on the 26th of last month have left 1,375 people dead and 5,531 missing in Nepal and China's Tibet Autonomous Region, which share a border, as of the previous day.
Meanwhile, a landslide and flooding also struck an area about 100 kilometers west of the hardest-hit zone, killing two hydropower plant workers. According to local media including the Kathmandu Post, a landslide hit the Super Seti hydropower plant construction site in the Kaski district of Gandaki Province in central Nepal at about 11 a.m. the previous day, killing two people and injuring one.
