Nepal Toll Crosses 1,000 as Rescuers Blast Toward Trapped
The flood death toll passed one thousand, Nepal’s disaster agency confirmed, with more than 3,900 still missing — over six hundred of them workers believed trapped in mud-filled hydropower tunnels, where the army is now using explosives to blast through hillsides. One team entered a tunnel and found no one; families call the operation “frustratingly slow”. Amid the grief, a missing Australian was found alive, and rescuers pulled out a six-year-old child.
A four-figure toll places this among the Himalaya’s worst disasters of the modern era, and the rescue has entered its most agonising phase — the one where a tunnel is finally opened and found empty, where explosives must be risked near chambers that might hold the living, and where every survivor pulled out recalibrates hope for six hundred families camped at the tunnel mouths. The international operation Nepal resisted last week now leads the effort: Chinese and Nepalese military teams with Indian, Korean and Australian specialists, across eleven wrecked hydropower projects. The Australian found alive, and the child, are the stories that keep the diggers going. Watch the tunnel-by-tunnel results — and the monsoon forecast that governs everything above them.