[Anchor]
Turning now to the severe flooding in Nepal, the government response team has directly launched an overland search to locate nine South Korean nationals who remain out of contact. The plan is to speed up the search by getting as close as possible to the missing persons' location via land. In addition, two helicopters secured by the South Korean side were deployed to conduct aerial searches.
Reporter Kwon Min-kyu has more from Nepal.
[Reporter]
Local time today (the 31st), morning and afternoon, two helicopters secured by South Korea were successively deployed to search for the missing South Koreans with the permission of Nepalese authorities.
They conducted visual searches and took video footage while flying around the office building of the hydroelectric power plant construction site where the missing individuals were, and the intake weir dam located upstream.
Prior to this, following the massive flood on the 26th, there had been three helicopter searches to find the missing South Koreans, but all of them consisted only of brief aerial visual inspections.
With no progress in the search for the missing persons six days into the severe floods, a government rapid response team of nine departed from the South Korean Embassy in Kathmandu local time today by land, heading toward the hydroelectric power plant construction site where the nine South Koreans went missing.
[Response Team Member: We will do our best.]
The response team plans to travel to the Ramche area, located about 2 kilometers away from the accident site today, approach Dunche close to the accident site tomorrow, and thoroughly search the spots where the missing South Koreans are presumed to have been.
[Cho Hyun-moon, Head of the National 119 Rescue Headquarters under the National Fire Agency: We are departing for the site to gather search intelligence. Please pay attention to safety so that rapid search and rescue operations can be carried out...]
The distance from the dam construction site office building and the upper weir dam, where the South Korean employees are presumed to have gone missing, is about 10 kilometers. Because the search area is wide and roads were washed away by the severe flood, considerable difficulties are expected in accessing the site and conducting the search.
The rapid response team stated that it has requested the Nepalese government to provide search support and grant permission for the use of drones.
(Video by: Seol Chi-hwan, Kang Si-woo | Video Editing by: Lee So-young | Design by: Kim Han-gil)
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