BETRAWATI, Nepal, Sept 7 — Believing she had perished in Nepal's deadly floods, Chandika Kumari Shrestha's family had already begun the ritual of mourning her death.
Ten days later, rescuers found the elderly woman alive inside her collapsed home in the devastated village of Betrawati, 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 left in the middle of quicksand. While walking around it, we heard a voice saying, ‘Save me,’” police officer Mahendra Darnal said.
In a 45-minute rescue operation on Saturday, 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 hundreds of people missing in Betrawati, one of the areas hardest hit by the floods in Nepal, where white deposits have engulfed the area and compacted until they are almost as hard as concrete.
Crews continue to recover scores of 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 has killed more than 1,300 people across Nepal. Thousands remain unaccounted for.
Rescue workers wearing hard hats were seen digging with shovels, while others crawled through gaps in collapsed buildings, periodically blowing whistles in an attempt to attract the attention of anyone trapped alive.
Five days earlier, 24 decomposed bodies were found in Betrawati's market area inside a building that had housed a small shop, Darnal said.
Looking for signs of life
Eleven days after a glacial collapse triggered the devastating floods, nearly 5,000 people remain missing.
Hundreds of bodies have been swept onto riverbanks far from the ravaged Rasuwa district. In Chitwan, hundreds of kilometres away, several rounds of mass burials have been held for unidentified and badly decomposed bodies.
Even as hopes of finding more survivors begin to fade, Nepalese authorities are continuing efforts to locate people trapped in tunnels and beneath thick deposits of mud that have hardened over buildings.
Since Friday, rescuers have pulled three people from tunnels, including a Chinese citizen near the Trishuli River, where more than 900 people are believed to be trapped.
Others, like Shrestha, have survived in extraordinary circumstances, including an eight-year-old boy who was also reunited with his mother.
