The families of more than 600 workers believed to be trapped in a vast network of mud-filled tunnels along Nepal's Trishuli River are clinging to hope their loved ones can be found alive.Rescuers continued battling to reach them on Monday, using explosives to blast into the hillside before pumping air into the Trishuli-3A site – fearing a critical window to reach survivors is closing."I wish we could find him. I wish he would come home," Anushila Bhandari, wife of Aurus Bhandari, a 33-year-old engineer missing on a project site, told BBC Nepali.It comes as the death toll from the flood disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border reached 939, according to the country's disaster management authority.The agency also revised its estimate of the number of missing to 3,925, of whom 592 are foreign nationals.Roughly one in seven missing people are believed to be workers at the hydropower plants. Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah said on Monday that 279 people had been rescued from the sites.The rescue operation is being spearheaded by an international team made up of Chinese and Nepalese military personnel, while experts from India, Korea and Australia are also involved."I still have a 50% hope that he is alive because there is an oxygen system inside," Sita Pandey, whose husband was working in the plant when the floods hit, told Nepalese daily Kantipur.Nepal relies heavily on hydropower and has spent years developing the projects along its mountainous river systems. At least 11 projects either completed or under construction were damaged in the floods, authorities said.Rescuers began pumping air into a tunnel over the weekend, but the families of those trapped say that should have been done earlier.A team was able to get into a tunnel leading to one hydropower plant earlier on Monday, but withdrew after finding no one there."The longer it takes, the more our hope dies. This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us," Jiban Khadka, whose relative is also trapped inside the plant, told Kantipur. "It's a frustratingly slow operation," Khadka added.Rescue operations had been "intensified", Nepalese leader Shah said, noting that the floods were "not an ordinary" event."This incident indicates that the risks we face in the Himalayan region are increasing alongside climate change."It is now time for us to strongly raise with the international community the issue of the disasters we are experiencing as a result of climate change," Shah wrote in a Facebook post late on Monday.Another family member anxiously awaiting news is Priya Kharel, whose brother Milan was working as an engineer in the Upper Trishuli-1 plant when the floods hit."Those who returned from the hydropower site said there were people inside the tunnel," she told BBC News Nepali. "So there is hope that if the army reaches them quickly, they can be saved."Only 4% of the 900 bodies that have been found so far have been identified, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Health told BBC Nepali. In Chitwan, a district far downstream from where the floods first hit, makeshift burials were taking place after the Himalayan nation's river systems brought nearly 300 dead bodies to its banks.The air was thick with the smell of decay, as men wearing white Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) including masks carried unidentified corpses into trucks.Over the weekend, a large portion of the forest outside the city was dug up. Medical staff and volunteers worked to extract DNA from the unidentified remains.Ganesh Aryaal, the chief district officer, told BBC Nepali that relatives will still be able to extricate the remains of their loved ones, once they are identified through DNA testing."We don't have enough freezers here... We had to choose this last alternative of temporary burial system. We are really overwhelmed," he said.