As many as 23 workers from Bardiya, who were stranded after the Bhotekoshi flood in Rasuwa, returned home on Sunday, five days after the disaster.

Among them was 38-year-old Krishna Prasad Chaudhary from ward 2 of Barbardiya Municipality, whose family had spent days anxiously waiting for news of him.

When Chaudhary finally arrived home on Sunday night, his return brought relief to his wife, Bima.

“The news of the devastating flood in Rasuwa left us terrified,” she said. “My husband called on Wednesday afternoon from someone else’s phone and told us that he had narrowly escaped the flood,” she said. “After that, however, we could not reach him on his phone, which left me extremely anxious.”

She said she repeatedly contacted the families of other villagers who had gone to Rasuwa with her husband, hoping someone had heard from them.

“I only breathed a sigh of relief after he returned home,” she said.

Chaudhary had gone to work as a labourer at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project in Mailung, Rasuwa, in late July after finishing the rice-planting season, to earn money for his family ahead of the festivals.

He now feels he returned home from the brink of death.

“The terror of that day is something I will never forget. Even now, thinking about it frightens me,” he said.

On Wednesday morning, Chaudhary and 14 other Nepali workers, under the leadership of a Chinese team leader, entered a tunnel at the project as they did every day. They were cleaning the tunnel in preparation for placing plain cement concrete when they were alerted to the flood.

“Another group was working about 50 metres away from us. We were cleaning the tunnel to prepare for PCC work,” he said. At around 9:30am, a Chinese employee of the hydropower project who was outside the tunnel alerted their team leader over a walkie-talkie that a flood was approaching.

The workers scrambled to get out.

“Within a short while, a company vehicle entered the tunnel and took us outside. As soon as we got out, a huge surge of floodwater entered the tunnel,” Chaudhary said.

He then ran towards the hillside, grabbing grass and whatever he could to pull himself up.

“My teammates managed to escape by climbing the slopes,” he said. “But we could not see the Chinese, Indian or Korean workers, or many of our Nepali colleagues, who were working at other sites of the project.”

Chaudhary and his colleagues spent two nights under the open sky before being rescued by helicopter and taken to Nuwakot. Only then did he begin to believe he would survive.

“I survived and came back by sheer luck,” he said.

For 46-year-old Jagat Ram Chaudhary of Kusumdanda in ward 1 of Barbardiya Municipality, the flood came with little warning.

He was working in a tunnel at another site of the Upper Trishuli project when he felt a sudden gust of wind.

“After the wind, a torrent of muddy water suddenly entered the tunnel. Mud filled the gumboots I was wearing,” he said. “I struggled to pull them off and somehow managed to escape through a small opening above us. That saved my life.”

One of his colleagues from Siraha, however, could not make it out of the tunnel, he said.

Thirty-three-year-old Raj Kumar Chaudhary from ward 1 was working outside the tunnel when another worker called him in a panic and warned him about the flood.

That warning allowed him to escape, but the camp where the workers were staying was completely buried.

“Nothing was left of our camp,” he said.

Even after surviving the flood, Jagat Ram faced another danger on the journey home. The bus carrying the 23 workers collided with a truck in Nawalpur.

Nineteen of the 23 passengers were injured, suffering injuries to their heads, hands and waists.

“We are very happy that our people have returned home, but many people from the neighbouring villages are still out of contact,” said Tularani Chaudhary, Jagat Ram’s wife. “The government should intensify the search and rescue efforts and find them as soon as possible.”

As many as 78 people from Bardiya remain out of contact following the Bhotekoshi flood.