Nepali woman rescued after her family had begun mourning rites

The family of Chandika Kumari Shrestha began mourning after believing that devastating floods sweeping across Nepal had claimed the elderly woman’s life. But ten days later, rescue teams found her in her destroyed home in the devastated village of Petrawati, where she had clung to a narrow space to breathe amid the water and mud.

He added that his team found Shrestha in a confined space during a rescue operation that took 45 minutes on Saturday, before she was transferred to a military hospital.

He noted that he had been in contact with her family, which had already begun an 11-day mourning period.

Shrestha was among hundreds of missing persons in Petrawati, one of the areas hardest hit by the floods in Nepal, which were covered by a thick, concrete-like white sediment. Rescue teams are still recovering dozens of bodies from the area.

The town’s main market and most residential buildings, some of which were up to four stories high, were almost completely buried under the rubble left by the torrential floods that swept through the valley. The disaster claimed more than 1,300 lives across Nepal, with thousands still missing.

Rescue workers wearing protective helmets were seen digging with shovels, while some crawled through gaps between collapsed buildings and repeatedly blew whistles to check if anyone was still alive under the debris.

Darnal said that five days earlier, 24 decomposing bodies were found inside a building that housed a small shop in the Petrawati market area.

Eleven days after a glacial lake outburst triggered the devastating floods, around 5,000 people remain missing.

The waters swept hundreds of bodies to riverbanks far from the devastated Rasuwa area. In Chitwan, hundreds of miles away, several mass burials were conducted for unidentified and severely decomposed corpses.

Despite fading hopes, Nepalese authorities continue their efforts to search for people trapped in tunnels and beneath thick layers of hardened mud that have cemented over buildings.

Since Friday, rescue teams have managed to extract three people from tunnels, including a Chinese national near the Trishuli River, where it is believed that more than 900 people remain trapped. Others, like Shrestha, survived under extraordinary circumstances, including an eight-year-old child who was reunited with his mother.