Families of more than 600 workers in Nepal’s Trishuli River region are holding on to hope. Rescue teams have been blasting the hillside harder and pumping air into massive mud‑filled tunnels to find the missing.
Using explosives to break open rock has become the only way to reach the Trishuli‑3A plant where workers are believed to be trapped. The engineers and military personnel from China, Nepal, India, Korea and Australia are working around the clock, trying to get a foothold in the stone before the window closes.
A Nepalese army medevac is racing through the cratered landscape while a team of Tibetan engineers remotely guides them with drones. Every second counts: the longer the rescue takes, the slimmer the chance of alive survivors.
The government’s latest figures say 939 people have died and 3,925 are missing, of which 592 are foreigners. The largest groups still missing are hydropower plant workers, proving these sites are a critical focus.
In Chitwan, half‑a‑mile downstream, morgues have been buried tiny coffins for unidentified bodies that floodwaters have washed out of tunnels. Authorities say the ditch is temporary until DNA testing can confirm who the bodies belong to.
