Nepal Floods: Family Begins Funeral Rites, Then Finds Missing Grandmother Alive After 10 Days

For 10 days, Chandika Kumari Shrestha remained trapped in a small pocket beneath a collapsed building while her family believed she was dead and began funeral rites. Then rescuers heard a cry for help from the wreckage in Betrawati, one of the areas hardest hit by Nepal's floods.

The four-story building had been swept away by floodwater and lodged in a field of unstable mud. Police officer Mahendra Darnal said rescuers heard someone calling, "Save me," as they searched around the ruins. Darnal and his colleagues reached the trapped woman and brought her out during a 45-minute rescue operation on Sept. 5. They took her to a military hospital.

Darnal said he remained in contact with Shrestha's family, who had already begun the 11-day mourning ritual. Her survival came as rescuers continued looking for signs of life beneath thick layers of mud and inside tunnels, even as hopes of finding more survivors faded.

The floods followed a glacial collapse on Aug. 26 in the Nepal-China border region. Nearly 5,000 people were still missing 11 days later. Hundreds of bodies had been carried down rivers far from Rasuwa district, the disaster's epicenter, and mass burials took place in Chitwan for victims whose identities could not be confirmed or whose remains had severely decomposed.

The search had also produced other breakthroughs. On Sept. 4, rescuers pulled three people from tunnels near the Trishuli River, including a Chinese citizen. Earlier, they found an eight-year-old boy alive in the disaster zone and reunited him with his mother.

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