These men had a hellish escape from Nepal’s flooded hydro tunnels. They were the lucky ones | CNN

As water, concrete and debris stormed through the darkness, almost sweeping him off his feet, Ram Chandra tightly gripped onto one of the rungs studded into the roof of the tunnel he was working in on the banks of Nepal’s Trishuli river. His quick reaction likely saved his life. He and the small group of colleagues he was with were hundreds of meters from the exit. “The water was rising and it was difficult to move my legs. If I had let go from that rung I would have fallen.” He grabbed hold of a tin sheet to have something to place under his feet and they passed it around the group as they inched their way forward rung by rung for six hours. “There were six of us and we later found someone else at the gate of the tunnel,” he said. By the time they emerged, the waters had claimed their clothing. In the daylight they saw the catastrophic destruction the flood had left in its wake, the still surging river below, stained dark by the debris, ice and silt. The mountains above had unleashed a cataclysmic deluge that swept 62 miles (100 km) downstream, killing hundreds and burying entire communities in the worst natural disaster to hit Nepal in years. Among the missing are more