Believing she had perished in Nepal’s deadly floods, the family of Chandika Kumari Shrestha started the ritual of mourning the elderly woman’s death.
Ten days later, rescuers found her alive inside her collapsed home in the devastated Betrawati village, where she had survived in a narrow pocket of air amid water and mud.
“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,'” police officer Mahendra Darnal said.
In a rescue operation on Saturday lasting 45 minutes, Darnal and his team found Shrestha in a confined space and sent her to an army hospital.
“I was in touch with the family and they had started the 11-day mourning period,” Darnal said.
Shrestha was among the hundreds missing in Betrawati, an area among the hardest hit by the floods in Nepal and engulfed with white deposits compacted almost like concrete. Crews continue to recover scores of dead bodies.
The town’s market and most residential buildings, some as tall as four storeys, were almost completely buried under debris left by a torrent that swept through the valley, part of a disaster that killed more than 1,300 people across Nepal. Thousands remain unaccounted for.
Rescue workers wearing hard hats were seen digging with shovels, while some were crawling through the gaps of collapsed buildings periodically blowing whistles to get the attention of anyone trapped and alive.
Five days earlier, 24 bodies were found in a decomposed state in Betrawati’s market area in a building that had contained a small shop, Darnal said.
Looking for signs of life
Eleven days since a glacial collapse triggered the devastating floods, close to 5,000 are still missing.
Hundreds of bodies have been swept onto the banks of rivers far from the ravaged Rasuwa district. In Chitwan, hundreds of miles away, several rounds of mass burials have taken place for unidentified and badly decomposed bodies.
Even as hope is beginning to fade, Nepal authorities continue their effort to look for people stuck in tunnels and under the thick deposits of mud that have hardened over buildings.
Since Friday, they have pulled out three people from the tunnels, including a Chinese citizen by the Trishuli river, where more than 900 are believed to be trapped.
Others like Shrestha have survived in extraordinary conditions, including an 8-year-old boy who was also reunited with his mother.
