Woman survives Nepal flood as family holds a funeral
Photo: REUTERS
Rescuers in Nepal have pulled an elderly woman alive from the debris of her collapsed home in the devastated village of Betrawati, ten days after her family began her funeral rites.
Her family, assuming she died in the country’s fatal deluge, had already initiated the mourning rituals for Chandika Kumari Shrestha.
Shrestha survived within a tiny pocket of air surrounded by mud and water. Police Officer Mahendra Darnal said, “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,’”
On Saturday, Darnal and his rescue team conducted a 45-minute operation to free Shrestha from the restricted space and transported her to an army hospital. He added, “I was in touch with the family and they had started the 11-day mourning period.”
Prior to her rescue, authorities had listed Shrestha among the hundreds of missing residents in Betrawati. The disaster has coated this badly hit region in compacted white deposits that resemble solid concrete.
While teams continue to retrieve dead bodies, the violent torrent that tore through the valley has almost entirely buried the town’s market and residential buildings, some rising four stories high. The catastrophe has claimed more than 1,300 lives across Nepal, and thousands of individuals remain missing.
Rescue personnel wearing hard hats are utilizing shovels to dig through the wreckage, and some are crawling into the fissures of demolished structures while regularly blowing whistles to signal any remaining survivors.
Darnal noted that five days prior, workers retrieved 24 highly decomposed bodies from a building that housed a small retail shop in Betrawati’s market sector.
The cataclysmic flooding, which a glacial collapse triggered 11 days ago, has left around 5,000 people missing. The raging waters have washed hundreds of corpses onto riverbanks far from the shattered Rasuwa district.
In Chitwan, located hundreds of miles away, workers have performed multiple mass burials for unidentified, severely decomposed remains. Although hope is dwindling, Nepali officials persist in their search for survivors trapped inside tunnels and beneath the solidified mud covering the buildings.
Since Friday, emergency workers have extracted three individuals from tunnels, including a Chinese national near the Trishuli River, where officials believe more than 900 people are trapped. Others have also survived under incredible circumstances, such as an eight-year-old boy who has reunited with his mother.
Source: Reuters (adapted)
