Days after Chandika Shrestha’s family performed her final rites, assuming they would never locate her body, a faint sound emerged from a house on the battered riverside in northern Nepal.
The three‑story building was almost completely buried, its roof and the uppermost window tips barely protruding above the mud, yet the desperate plea for assistance could still be heard.
Ms. Shrestha was still alive.
Over the course of ten days following the catastrophic floods that devastated her town, Ms. Shrestha clung to life beneath the debris. When locals heard her cry on Saturday, they quickly sought emergency responders. Some waded through the mud to locate an opening, while others cleared a path with shovels. After providing her water, they airlifted her in a white helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.
“We have no words to express how joyous we feel,” her nephew Surendra Lal Shrestha said outside the hospital.
Ms. Shrestha’s recovery marked the second miraculous rescue of the day.
Earlier on Saturday, the Nepali Army reported that a joint rescue team discovered a Chinese worker trapped in a 740‑foot tunnel at the Upper Trishuli‑1 hydropower project. Both the Chinese worker—whose name has not yet been disclosed—and Ms. Shrestha survived well beyond the typical 72‑hour threshold for natural disaster victims.
At least 1,300 people perished in last week’s floods, triggered by a Himalayan glacier collapse that unleashed tsunami‑like waves across valleys along the Nepal‑Tibet border. Approximately 5,000 individuals remain missing.
In recent days, emergency responders have concentrated on Nepal’s emerging hydropower stations—including the one where the Chinese worker was found—because personnel inside may have been better protected from the flood’s force than residents living near the rivers, who suffered the brunt of the deluge.
Despite residing directly beside the river in one of the hardest‑hit towns, Ms. Shrestha defied those odds.
The New York Times reporters spent much of Friday in Betrawati, a town nearly obliterated by the floods. Rescue teams there had largely ceased searching for survivors among the ruins.
No trace remains of the former bazaar, which once hosted about 200 shops on each riverbank, nor of the two bridges that linked the sides, the Ram temple frequented by locals, or the two‑story police station building that was torn from its foundations and deposited on its side.
In the two river‑spanning wards, nearly 300 people are still missing, officials reported. Ganesh Kumar Nepal, a ward chair, said that rescue workers had been stationed near Ms. Shrestha’s house during the search. Although they had visited the house earlier, they had not located her, possibly due to inadequate inspection.
As night fell on Friday, electricity had not yet been restored to the surviving elevated houses. The town was quiet, punctuated only by cricket chirps and the roar of the river.
News of Ms. Shrestha’s survival on Saturday reinvigorated the town’s hope. People rushed to the riverbank opposite the house where she was found to watch the rescue. Her son Ashish Shrestha, who remained at the hospital with her after the rescue, said she was being treated for an infection in one leg.
Three generations of the Shrestha family previously operated a clothing shop in the town before the floods, Shailendra Kumar Shrestha, Ms. Shrestha’s brother, said on Saturday. She frequently traveled to Kathmandu to purchase materials, he noted while waiting outside the hospital where his sister is being treated.
However, Ms. Shrestha was at home when the floods arrived.
When walls of water and mud surged into the town, her husband Ananda Lal Shrestha ran into the streets urging evacuation. She reached an upper floor of the house, but her husband did not have enough time; he remains missing.
Local officials and residents who witnessed the rescue on Saturday said they believed the house had been carried roughly 200 meters downstream from its original site.
Exact details of how rescuers first located Ms. Shrestha remain unclear; officials said locals investigating the house’s remnants heard a faint cry. Her brother reported that they also heard clanking plates, and initially thought the sounds were evidence of a ghost.
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