Nepal’s Tunnel Rescue Follows a Familiar Himalayan Script

Two men were pulled alive on September 4 from a tunnel at Nepal’s Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower plant, nine days after ice and rock tore down the valley. Sanjay Sah, a mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, a mechanical supervisor, are the first workers brought out of a sealed hydro tunnel since the August 26 flood.

The Nepal Electricity Authority had listed 42 people missing at the 60 MW plant. Rescuers heard voices inside on September 3. Videos released by the army show Maharjan lifted through a hole in the ground onto a stretcher. Sah was carried to a tent, his face caked in mud. An energy ministry source said Maharjan cannot move his hands and legs, and that Sah’s injuries are not critical. Both were to be flown to Kathmandu.

Alive After Nine Days in Trishuli 3A

Finding the door took almost six days. Amshu Kiran Shahi, a board member of the Nepal Electricity Authority, said the entrance was buried, and that crews had been pushing oxygen through pipes into any cavity that might still hold air. Arnold Dix, the Melbourne tunnel engineer asked in to advise, told interviewers the old portal now sits under the river, with boulders thrown into the bore. Army sappers used explosives on the rocks, a step Dix called a last resort in a live rescue, and cut an artificial drain so water would run out instead of in.

Nepal Army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet had already warned that this was not a blocked adit in the ordinary sense.

The flood has altered the terrain around the tunnels and changed their structure, while mud, rocks, soil and other debris had accumulated inside. This is not a normal closure of tunnels.

Raja Ram Basnet, Nepal Army spokesperson

A Reuters photographer flying over the site on September 3 saw excavators working boulders at a tunnel mouth and trying to go deeper. Prime Minister Balendra Shah had said earlier that 279 hydropower workers were already out. Those people walked or were lifted in the first days. Sah and Maharjan are the first to come from a tunnel that stayed sealed into a second week.

Goldilocks Rooms Inside an 11-Storey Powerhouse

The rooms rescuers want are not the long headrace tunnels that once carried river water to the turbines. Dix is aiming at the underground powerhouse itself, an 11-storey cavern inside the mountain at Trishuli 3A, and at a band of space between the incoming tunnels and the roof. He calls that band the Goldilocks zone: high enough that a slurry of mud might not have filled it, large enough to hold air, close to pantries and water if anyone reached it when the surge hit.

There’s plenty of air there in the Goldilocks zone, and it’s a large space. If there was any place you were going to survive, it would be there.

Arnold Dix, tunnel engineer advising Nepal’s rescue

He puts a hard ceiling on that hope. Survivors, he said, could live as long as 17 days, the same span as the 41 men he helped bring out of the Silkyara tunnel in India in 2023. Lower down, around the turbines, he does not expect anyone alive. Mud at a portal, he warned, may mean water already sits above the level crews want. Getting into the high chambers may mean drilling from above and breaking reinforced concrete, not walking in from the river.

WHAT THE HIGH CHAMBERS NEED TO OFFER

• Height: Space at the top of the powerhouse, above the turbine floor, is the only band Dix treats as livable.
• Air: A large cavern can hold breathable air even when the headrace is packed “like toothpaste in a tube,” in the words of drone pilot Manish Maharjan.
• Stores: Pantries and service bays in the upper floors are the reason officials still talk about food and water at Rasuwagadhi.
• A way in: At 3A that way in was a hole dug after the original mouth disappeared under the new riverbed.

Jenjen Lama, a mountain guide on the Chilime search, sent rescuers a cross-section that makes the same bet: a 250-metre access tunnel running downhill to a powerhouse, with any living people in the high service bay and control room, not in the transformer pit. Forty workers at the 216 MW Upper Trishuli-1 plant got a cruder version of that luck on August 26. Leelanath Neupane, 53, was 3.5 km inside when wood and muddy water came toward the crew. A vehicle swept in by the flood wedged near the mouth and slowed the debris. The men waited about 45 minutes, then walked out through sludge for two and a half hours. “If the vehicle had not got stuck in the tunnel, our entire tunnel would have filled with mud,” Neupane said.

The Last Maps Live on Engineers’ Phones

The engineers’ WhatsApp group existed before the flood. After August 26 it became the place that still knew the plants, because the offices did not. The chat now has more than 500 members. On August 30 a government official typed, “Can you send me Chilime layout drawings.” Minutes later someone posted powerhouse plans and access-tunnel notes. A Nepal Electricity Authority manager, speaking without a name, said crews also pulled former plant staff into the thread to talk them through the network, and that the posted drawings were useful.

Members passed names and mobile numbers of missing workers to officials, asking telecom companies for last known locations. That is the part the wire story treated as a clever workaround. It is also a record of how completely the sites were erased. Jan Jiwan Thakur, a civil engineer at Upper Trishuli-1, got a colleague’s warning seconds before the surge and climbed the hillside with about 100 others. “We just ran away towards the hillside and, after two to three minutes, when we looked down, everything was gone,” he said. “The flood debris had entirely covered our office area.”

Dhan Bahadur Tamang got out through a tunnel at the same plant as pipes and kit blew past him. He knew the system well enough to find an exit. He also saw bodies on the way. Dix described the ground as a place where “everything is just missing,” and said crews needed satellites, old drawings, and helicopter video just to stand in the right spot. Early machines had to weigh under three tonnes because the roads were gone. Hands and shovels did the first metres. “There are boulders bigger than houses,” Dix said. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

Chamoli Already Wrote This Script

On February 7, 2021, rock and ice came off a high face in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district and ran down the Rishi Ganga and Dhauliganga. Two hydropower sites took the hit, including NTPC’s Tapovan Vishnugad plant. About 200 people were later counted dead or missing. Some 140 of them were workers at Tapovan. Sixteen men came out of one tunnel that first evening after an engineer pointed Indo-Tibetan Border Police to an escape door a few hundred feet from the exit. About 35 others were believed trapped in a 1.9 km to 2.5 km headrace packed with slush. Ten days on, crews had cleared about 150 metres of a two-kilometre bore. Most of those men were not coming out.

The method was the same kit now sitting in Rasuwa: one excavator scooping wet muck, oxygen talk, a bet on dry pockets, families waiting at the mouth. Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at Grenoble Alpes University who has worked the Lhende Khola, told colleagues the 2026 cascade was ten times the 2021 Chamoli collapse. The geometry did not change. Himalayan run-of-river plants put large crews in gorges and in tunnels that become cul-de-sacs when a mountainside fails. Silkyara in 2023, where Dix’s team brought 41 men out after 17 days, was a collapse in a highway bore, not a debris flood. It set the survival clock Dix is using. It did not set the trap. Chamoli did.

A Landslide That Shook Like a Quake

The U.S. Geological Survey first logged a magnitude 4.4 earthquake at 8:37 a.m. local time on August 26. Later analysis of nearby stations, long-period waves, and satellite images dropped the earthquake. The shaking was the fall itself, raised to magnitude 5.2. Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, ran the Global Seismographic Network through his lab’s code and put the mass in the hundreds of millions of tons, more ice than a glacier tongue holds. Cloud-free frames from India’s ocean satellite and Landsat-9 showed the rock face. “The glacier just came along for the ride,” Ekström said. Cook had already seen the long, low seismic pulse of a landslide, not a tectonic snap.

HOW THE VALLEY WAS REMADE

1. August 26, 2026, 8:37 a.m.: Rock and ice leave the north face of Langtang Lirung, near 5,200 metres, and drop toward the Lhende Khola.
2. Minutes after the fall: Debris runs on the order of 150 kilometres an hour. Downstream gauges, before they died, showed river levels jumping about 9 metres in 30 minutes.
3. The same morning: The surge takes the Gyirong crossing on the Tibet side and the Trishuli corridor in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, filling plant yards and tunnel mouths.
4. August 30: Chilime drawings move across the engineers’ WhatsApp group as crews hunt buried portals.
5. About September 1: Rescuers finally reach the 3A tunnel after almost six days of digging. Oxygen pipes go in.
6. September 3 to 4: Voices from 3A. Sah and Maharjan come out. An Indian technical team reports 100 metres into the Chilime tunnel.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development describes an ice-rock avalanche into the Lhende River on the Nepali side, outside the reach of China’s warning net. Cook’s group found no seismic or satellite sign of a glacial-lake outburst. She argues the flow scooped river water and old valley ice as it ran. Alton Byers, a mountain geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, points at thawing high-altitude permafrost that once pinned rock to ice. Ekström’s line is blunter: where glaciers are disappearing, these landslides come more often. That is the backdrop in 50 years of Himalayan glacier monitoring, not a verdict on this single slope.

Who Is Still Underground?

Nepal’s Independent Power Producers’ Association counts 947 hydropower workers unaccounted for across 11 projects. The tunnel search is concentrated on six plants in the Trishuli and Bhotekoshi corridor. IPPAN itself cannot yet split who is in a chamber from who was carried down the river. That gap is the whole job.

PLANTS STILL BEING SEARCHED

Shahi said the 46 at Rasuwagadhi may sit in a room-like structure with food and water, and that the army walked the tunnel three days before September 3 without finding that room. “We are going in again.” At Chilime, photographs from the first days of September showed flood debris rising to the roof a short way inside. Naveen Srivastava, India’s ambassador in Kathmandu, walked the swampy ground at Syabrubesi on September 3 and said the Indian technical team, working with the Nepal Army, had already gone 100 metres into the Chilime powerhouse tunnel and wanted heavier kit for the next stretch.

https://x.com/navsri6619/status/2095469742673047864

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, in its 7 p.m. bulletin on September 3, put Nepal’s dead at 1,259 and the missing at 5,083. Only 95 bodies had been identified and handed to families. About 11,993 people had been rescued across the wider flood belt. Chinese tallies the same week stood at 21 dead and 541 missing in Tibet. Chitwan had 355 recovered bodies, the highest district figure, because the Trishuli carried people and wreckage far below the gorge. Miracle talk around two men does not move those ledgers. The 947 figure is still the hydro share of a much larger missing list.

Rajesh Shrestha runs a workshop making window grills. His son Rajish, 30, is an environmental engineer at Upper Trishuli-1. “Whenever I look outside, I imagine seeing him carrying a bag and coming home, just as he used to,” he said. “I am surviving on the hope that he will return.”

Nepal Lost a Tenth of Its Power in the Flood

The Nepal Electricity Authority said 13 hydropower projects were damaged. Operating plants totalling 431 MW came off the grid, about 10 percent of an installed base of roughly 4,300 MW. Projects still being built, another 470 MW, were hit as well. The plants were part of a corridor that feeds Nepal and sells surplus across the border. Rasuwagadhi’s customs yard, a dry-port crossing worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year in ordinary trade, was destroyed in the same hours. The minister for physical infrastructure put early road and bridge losses near NPR 200 billion, about $1.3 billion.

THE SEPTEMBER 3 SNAPSHOT

• Dead in Nepal: 1,259 bodies recovered, per NDRRMA’s evening update.
• Missing in Nepal: 5,083, including 947 hydropower workers on the IPPAN list.
• Power off the grid: 431 MW of running plant, plus 470 MW of unfinished capacity damaged.
• Debris in the valley: 2.2 million tonnes of mud and rock over the tunnel line.

Dix said some underground caverns likely stood up to the surge, and that the unknown is whether emergency gates closed in time or whether the river came in with the people. Crews at 3A are still listening. More voices were reported before Sah and Maharjan were lifted out, and the hole they came through is still a working face, not a closed grave.