Ten days after catastrophic flooding in Nepal, search efforts continue for hydropower workers feared trapped in tunnels, and the government has put rebuilding costs at around $5 billion.

South Korea has deployed a 44-member emergency relief team to support search and rescue. The Nepali Army has reported around 119 people rescued.

Ten days is a difficult number

Search and rescue after a disaster follows a grim arithmetic. Survival without water is generally measured in days rather than weeks, and the probability of live rescue falls steeply after the first seventy-two hours.

Tunnels complicate that in both directions. A tunnel can preserve a void space where a collapsed building would not, and there are documented cases of people surviving well beyond a week in underground workings with air and some water. That is why families continue to hope and why authorities continue to search long after the statistical odds have fallen — and it is why the phrase “feared trapped alive” appears in coverage of this kind.

Against that, tunnels flood. Water that entered under pressure does not necessarily drain, and pumping it out takes equipment that has to be brought to a site whose access roads may themselves have been destroyed.

Why hydropower workers

Nepal has invested heavily in hydropower, which is the country’s most significant domestic energy resource and a substantial export earner. Much of it is run-of-river construction in steep valleys, involving tunnels bored through mountainsides to carry water to turbines.

That places construction workforces in exactly the terrain most exposed to landslides and flash flooding during monsoon. It is not a design flaw so much as an unavoidable consequence of where the water and the fall are.

The wider question, which Nepali engineers and disaster researchers have raised for years, is whether construction schedules and monsoon risk assessments have kept pace with changing rainfall patterns. Glacial and high-altitude hydrology in the Himalaya is shifting, and infrastructure designed against twentieth-century flood records may be sized for conditions that no longer apply.

Five billion dollars, in context

A rebuilding estimate of that size is very large relative to Nepal’s economy, and reconstruction financing for disasters of this scale typically arrives slowly, in a mixture of grants, concessional loans and pledges that are not always fully disbursed.

Nepal’s experience after the 2015 earthquake is the relevant precedent, and it is not encouraging: reconstruction took far longer than announced, and the gap between pledged and delivered funding was substantial. Researchers who studied it identified the bottleneck as institutional capacity to spend rather than the total pledged.

Early damage estimates are also provisional by nature and are frequently revised in both directions once assessments are complete.

The pattern of attention

International coverage of a disaster peaks in the first few days and falls away sharply, while need runs in the opposite direction — rising through the months of reconstruction after the cameras leave.

Ten days in, Nepal is at the point where a story stops being news and becomes a budget line. That transition is where most of the actual suffering happens, and it is the part almost nobody reports.

Sources

• CNN live updates on rescue efforts in Nepal, September 2026
• The Korea Herald and Reuters, on South Korea’s 44-member emergency relief team deployment
• The Guardian, citing Nepali Army figures on people rescued
• Statements from Nepal’s finance ministry on rebuilding costs
• Published research on reconstruction financing following the 2015 Nepal earthquake