By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
The men had been in the dark nine days when rescuers reached them Friday, deep inside a hydropower tunnel in Nepal's flood-battered hills. Both were pulled out alive — a small mercy in a disaster that has left thousands missing across the Himalayan region.
The floods struck more than a week ago, sweeping away villages and roads in the kind of sudden, overwhelming water event that has become grimly familiar in a warming Himalaya. Emergency crews have been working the tunnel site since, and officials say roughly a dozen more workers are believed to still be trapped inside, according to ABC News and CBS News, which both confirmed the two survivors' rescue.
The scale of the missing — described by NBC News as being in the thousands across the wider region — points to a disaster whose full toll may not be known for some time. Nepal's rugged terrain has always made rescue and recovery slow going; this flood, cutting through hydropower infrastructure and mountain settlements alike, has been no exception.
Compounding the grim math is the work now underway to identify those who did not survive. Al Jazeera reports that officials are turning to DNA testing to identify bodies too mutilated or decomposed for visual recognition — a process now standard in disasters of this scale, but a wrenching one for families waiting on word of the missing.
The story of the two survivors is a rare bright note. It is also a reminder of how much infrastructure — a tunnel built to carry electricity to homes and factories — can become, in an instant, a tomb or a lifeline. Nepal's hydropower sector, a linchpin of its energy exports to India, sits exposed to exactly the kind of flash flooding that just tore through it. Rebuilding will take longer than the search for survivors. Both have only just begun.
— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and Al Jazeera.
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