An elderly couple, sixty-seven and sixty-two, lifted from a tree in the Trishuli flood

The Tamangs of Milan Chautara, in ward 1 of Bidur Municipality, Nuwakot, had crossed onto an island in the Trishuli to collect pieces of timber the river had brought down from the mountains. It was 8 July 2025. Upstream in Rasuwa, near the Chinese border, the Lhende stream had burst — possibly from a glacial lake outburst — and was sending an unannounced wall of water down the Trishuli system. By the time the couple realised what was happening, the channel between their island and the bank was already too deep and too fast to wade. They climbed the only tree on the sandbar and held on. The Nepali Army Disaster Management directorate received the alert and dispatched a helicopter. Within hours, a soldier was lowered from the aircraft on a line, secured the couple one at a time, and lifted them clear of the rising water. Both were airlifted to safety without injury. The same day, in the same coordinated operation, twenty-three workers of the Rasuwagadhi Hydroelectric Project were rescued from the upstream flood. The image of the soldier descending from the helicopter to the tree spread quickly across Nepali social media and became, briefly, a symbol of what state rescue capacity can do when it arrives in time.