The Trishuli River flowing through the Rasuwa-Nuwakot corridor of central Nepal, the river struck by the August 2026 flood
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Bhotekoshi Flood Day 11: Two Survivors Rescued Alive

Byanish maharjan

Quick answer (as of Saturday, 5 September 2026 — day 11 of the search): yes — rescue teams in Nepal have pulled two more survivors alive from the Bhotekoshi–Trishuli flash-flood disaster zone. A Chinese construction worker was brought out of a flooded hydropower tunnel in Rasuwa district, and a 64-year-old woman, Chandika Shrestha, was freed from the rubble of a house that the flood had swept away in Betravati, Bidur, in neighbouring Nuwakot district. They are the third and fourth people found alive since the catastrophic flood of 26 August, and the first to be rescued from a collapsed house rather than a tunnel. Both rescues were confirmed on Saturday by the Nepali Army and the Armed Police Force.

Eleven days into one of the most complex search operations Nepal has run in years, the two rescues have hardened rescuers’ conviction that more survivors may still be found — trapped not only inside hydropower tunnels, but inside the dozens of houses the flood picked up, flipped and half-buried along the river corridor from Rasuwa Gadhi on the Tibet border down to Galchhi in Dhading district.

The Trishuli River flowing through the Rasuwa-Nuwakot corridor of central Nepal
The Trishuli river along the Rasuwa–Nuwakot corridor — the river struck by the 26 August 2026 flood (archive image). Photo by Liznann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For travellers, this is the corridor that matters: the road up the Trishuli valley is the approach to Syaphrubensi — the trailhead village for Langtang Valley and Gosainkunda treks — and the river itself is one of Nepal’s busiest white-water rafting runs. We explained the geography and the initial rescue picture in our 1 September flood rescue update; this article covers what changed on day 11.

Key Takeaways

  • CONFIRMED (5 September): a Chinese national was rescued alive from the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project’s Adit 4 side tunnel in Rasuwa, eleven days after the flood, by a Nepali Army team assisted by South Korean disaster experts (Kathmandu Post).
  • CONFIRMED (5 September): Chandika Shrestha, 64, was rescued alive from a four-storey house that the flood carried about 50 metres and buried in Betravati, Bidur Municipality-10, Nuwakot; she is being treated in Kathmandu. Her husband remains missing (Kathmandu Post; Online Khabar, Nepali).
  • CONFIRMED: four people have now been rescued alive in total — three from hydropower tunnels and one from a house (Armed Police Force, via Online Khabar).
  • CONFIRMED (District Administration Office, Rasuwa, via RSS): the flood has damaged about 1,500 private homes, 28 government and public buildings, 41 km of road, 24 bridges and eight hydropower projects (nearly 590 MW); 264 tourists are among those out of contact.
  • For travellers: the Langtang/Syaphrubensi approach corridor and the Trishuli rafting stretch sit inside the disaster zone — do not plan travel into Rasuwa district yet; Everest and Annapurna region approaches are unaffected.

Table of Contents

The Day-11 Rescues: What Happened

Two separate teams, working roughly 40 kilometres apart along the same river system, scored the breakthroughs on Saturday.

In Rasuwa, soldiers of the Nepali Army, assisted by disaster experts from South Korea, brought out a Chinese national who had been trapped inside the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project’s side tunnel since the flood surged through on 26 August — ten days earlier. Army spokesman Rajaram Basnet said the man was being taken to an army barracks in Trishuli, Nuwakot, for further care (Kathmandu Post, 5 September).

In Nuwakot, a joint police and armed police team freed Chandika Shrestha, 64, from the upper floor of a four-storey house in Betravati — a house the flood had carried about 50 metres from its original position before burying three of its four floors in mud and debris (Kathmandu Post; Online Khabar, 5 September).

Inside the Upper Trishuli-1 Tunnel Rescue

The Upper Trishuli-1 project — a 216 MW run-of-river scheme on the Trishuli — was one of the worst-hit installations of the 26 August flood, which tore through the hydropower complexes strung along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. The rescued man had been inside the project’s tunnel complex since the day of the flood. The Kathmandu Post identifies his location as “Audit-4”; in hydropower engineering the term is “adit”, a lateral access tunnel connecting to the main headrace tunnel — and it is in exactly these adits that workers were caught when the water rose.

He is the third person brought out alive from a hydropower tunnel: on Friday, two workers had been rescued from the neighbouring Trishuli-3A project’s tunnel (Online Khabar, 5 September, Nepali). Both Trishuli-3A and Upper Trishuli-1 are among the eight projects the District Administration Office, Rasuwa, lists as fully damaged.

The Betravati House Rescue: “We Heard the Cry for Help”

The day’s most remarkable story came from Betravati, a settlement on the Trishuli’s banks in Bidur Municipality, the headquarters town of Nuwakot district. The commander of the rescue team on site described the operation to Online Khabar (Nepali), and his account explains why search crews refuse to stop:

For ten days, disaster-management-trained teams had been walking the debris field house by house, calling out and listening. Around 1 pm on Saturday, near the wreckage of a house that had belonged to one Anand Shrestha, they heard a woman’s voice crying for help. All that remained visible of the four-storey building was part of the top floor and a half-buried window. A ten-member Armed Police Force disaster-management team, working alongside a Nepal Police team, broke the window open — and found the woman inside with half her body pressed into the mud, able to speak but barely able to move. It took about 40 to 45 minutes to free her.

Local resident Narayanlal Dangol, whose own home stands 70 metres away, told Online Khabar the flood had carried her house roughly 50 metres before burying it. A ward member of Bidur Municipality-10, Mangal Tamang, said workers digging a new track through the debris heard the voice and called the police — the settlement’s ruined houses are still being cleared lane by lane.

Chandika Shrestha was able to walk, and rescuers deliberately kept her from talking much to protect her fragile condition. The Armed Police Force spokesperson, Netra Bahadur Karki, said she was being flown by helicopter to Kathmandu for treatment; her family confirmed she has been admitted to Chhauni hospital. Her husband, reported missing since the flood, has not been found (Online Khabar, 5 September, Nepali).

The Kathmandu Post credits the Betravati rescue to a nine-member team led by Suman Kumar BK; Online Khabar’s first-person account comes from an Armed Police inspector identified as Suman Bik who commanded the team on site. The two reports agree on the essentials: a small joint team, a buried house, a voice in the rubble, and a roughly 45-minute extrication on day 11.

One detail from the commander’s interview explains the search’s grim persistence: earlier in the operation, his team recovered 22 bodies from a single house in the same settlement. If one house could hold that many victims, the reasoning goes, other collapsed structures could still hold the living.

Where the Search Stands: Drones, Tunnel Teams and Foreign Experts

Four people have been rescued alive so far — three from tunnels and one from a house, according to the Armed Police Force on Saturday. The search now runs the full length of the damaged corridor, from Rasuwa Gadhi on the Nepal–Tibet border down to Galchhi in Dhading district, and the home ministry says it will not scale back: Home Minister Sudhan Gurung told reporters that search and rescue continues across all flood-affected areas (Online Khabar, 5 September, Nepali).

The Chilime tunnel. At the 20 MW Chilime hydropower project, 21 soldiers — drawn from both the Nepali Army and the Indian Army — are inside the tunnel, manually clearing mud and heavy debris; about 100 metres of the 250-metre tunnel has been opened so far. Because manual clearing is too slow for the scale of the blockage, engineers began building an access road from Syaphrubensi to the powerhouse portal on Saturday so that a large excavator can be brought to the site; a parallel plan would push the excavator through the tunnel route itself. Large helicopters cannot land at the site, so small helicopters are ferrying in equipment and materials (Online Khabar, 5 September, Nepali).

A Swiss drone built for dark tunnels. Switzerland has donated a state-of-the-art semi-autonomous drone to Nepal to aid the tunnel search. The aircraft — a Flyability “Elios” series drone, provided through the Swiss company’s grant programme at the request of the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation — was handed over to the Nepal Electricity Authority on Saturday by a Swiss humanitarian aid specialist. The Elios is designed for exactly this environment: a carbon-fibre protective cage lets it collide with tunnel walls and rubble without crashing, powerful LED lighting and a thermal camera let it detect the body heat of trapped survivors in total darkness, and LiDAR sensors build instant 3D maps of the debris and damage inside flooded, collapsed tunnels (Online Khabar, 5 September, Nepali).

International teams. Disaster experts from South Korea, India and China are deployed in the affected area alongside the Nepali Army, the Armed Police Force and the Nepal Police, according to the district disaster management committee. Relief food is being distributed to cut-off settlements by helicopter, the district administration said.

The Damage Picture in Rasuwa: The Official Tally

The District Administration Office, Rasuwa, released its preliminary damage assessment on Saturday (reported by the state news agency RSS and published by Online Khabar). Assistant Chief District Officer Dhruva Prasad Adhikari gave the following tally:

Asset Damage reported (as of 5 September 2026)
Private homes About 1,500 damaged
Government and public buildings 28
Schools 8 community and 3 private schools
Banks and financial institutions 14 offices
Other 1 petrol pump
Roads 41 km destroyed
Bridges 6 concrete, 8 Bailey and 10 suspension bridges washed away
Hydropower projects (fully damaged) 8 projects — nearly 590 MW of capacity

The eight fully damaged hydropower projects are: Rasuwagadhi (111 MW), Bhotekoshi (120 MW), Chilime (20 MW), Langtang Khola (20 MW), Upper Trishuli-1 (216 MW), Mailung Khola (5 MW), Upper Trishuli 3A (60 MW) and Trishuli 3B (37.3 MW).

The missing tally in the same report is sobering: 1,365 residents of Rasuwa and 1,160 people from other districts are out of contact, along with 264 tourists. Among the missing are 26 bank employees, 79 government employees, 13 armed police personnel, 28 Nepal Police personnel and 27 Nepali Army soldiers. These district-level figures are broader than the industry count we reported on 1 September, when the Independent Power Producers’ Association, Nepal (IPPAN) said 894 people were missing or out of contact across 11 hydropower projects — the agencies are tracking overlapping but differently-scoped lists, and both counts continue to move as rescues and recoveries are confirmed.

Why is so much infrastructure packed into this valley? Geography. The Trishuli river is formed by the merger of the Kerung Khola and the Lende Khola, which rise in Gyirong County of Tibet and join near Rasuwa Gadhi on the Nepal–Tibet border. The valley was the traditional trade route between the Kathmandu Valley and Tibet — and it remains the trunk route for both hydropower development and the approach to the Langtang trekking region (Wikipedia, “Trishuli River”, accessed 5 September 2026).

What It Means for Travellers and the Autumn Season

Nepal’s autumn trekking season — the busiest window of the year — begins in late September, and the flood’s scars run straight through one of its classic approach corridors. Here is the practical read as of 5 September:

  1. Do not plan travel into the Rasuwa corridor yet. Langtang Valley and Gosainkunda treks normally start from Syaphrubensi and Dhunche — the same valley where soldiers began cutting an access road from Syaphrubensi on Saturday for rescue machinery. The route is damaged, priority belongs to the rescue operation, and the district’s hotels and services are absorbed by relief work. Our Langtang Valley trek guide and Gosaikunda Lake trek guide describe the standard itinerary — treat them as planning material for a future season, not for now, and confirm the corridor’s status with your operator and official advisories before booking anything for October onward.
  2. Expect the Rasuwagadhi–Kerung border crossing to stay disrupted. The border post sits on the damaged river corridor near where the Kerung Khola enters Nepal. Overland travellers planning China–Nepal crossings should reconfirm the status of the route and any third-country crossing formalities well in advance.
  3. Trishuli rafting is off for now. The Trishuli is Nepal’s most popular commercial rafting river, with put-ins along this very stretch. Operators will avoid the flood-damaged sections until access roads, bridges and safety assessments are restored — and the dam infrastructure that regulates the river’s flow is itself among the casualties.
  4. Other autumn destinations are operating normally. The Everest and Annapurna region approaches do not use the Trishuli corridor — see our autumn climbing season 2026 guide for the expeditions and treks that are unaffected. Note that the separate Prithvi Highway closure at Krishnabhir (see our 5 September road update) does affect road travel from Kathmandu toward Pokhara — check that article for diversions and timelines.
  5. If you are trying to reach someone who was in the area: the District Administration Office says 264 tourists remain out of contact. Contact the Nepal Tourist Police, your embassy in Kathmandu, and your travel operator’s ground team; keep records of last-known locations. Our complete trekking safety and health guide covers emergency contacts, insurance that includes helicopter evacuation, and how to register your itinerary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has anyone been found alive in the Bhotekoshi flood?

Yes — four people so far, as of 5 September 2026. Two workers were rescued from the Trishuli-3A project tunnel on 4 September, and on 5 September — day 11 — a Chinese worker was pulled alive from the Upper Trishuli-1 Adit 4 tunnel in Rasuwa and Chandika Shrestha, 64, was rescued from a buried house in Betravati, Nuwakot.

Are tourists among the missing?

The District Administration Office, Rasuwa, said on 5 September that 264 tourists are out of contact, alongside 1,365 Rasuwa residents and 1,160 people from other districts. Search teams continue to work through the corridor, and the two day-11 rescues have reinforced the decision to keep the full-scale operation running.

Is the Langtang trek open right now?

Not realistically. The road approach to Syaphrubensi and Dhunche is damaged, rescue operations have priority on the corridor, and the district’s capacity is committed to relief work. Monitor official announcements from the Nepal Tourism Board and your trekking operator for reopening news before planning a Langtang or Gosainkunda itinerary.

Is it safe to trek in Nepal this autumn?

Outside the affected Rasuwa–Trishuli corridor, yes. The Everest and Annapurna regions were untouched by this flood, and autumn remains the classic trekking window. Standard precautions apply — buy insurance that covers helicopter evacuation, register your permits and itinerary, check weather forecasts, and trek with a licensed guide. Our trekking safety and health guide has the full checklist.

How are rescuers searching the tunnels?

Manually and now mechanically. About 21 Nepali and Indian army personnel are clearing the Chilime tunnel by hand (around 100 metres of 250 metres is open), an access road is being built so a large excavator can reach the portal, small helicopters are ferrying equipment, and a newly donated Swiss Flyability drone with thermal imaging and LiDAR 3D mapping is being deployed to scan flooded, collapsed sections that are too dangerous for people.

Sources

Published: 5 September 2026. All figures are labelled with their reporting date and source; the situation is evolving rapidly, and newer official statements may supersede the numbers above. This article follows the story covered in our 1 September rescue update.

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