Six-hour tunnel escape reveals Nepal flood’s hidden disaster as rescuers race to reach hundreds underground
By SCN NEWS
NUWAKOT/RASUWA, Nepal — For six hours, hydropower worker Ram Chandra moved through darkness inside a flooded Himalayan tunnel by gripping metal rungs fixed into its roof, fighting against water, concrete and debris that threatened to sweep him away. Hundreds of metres from the exit when Wednesday's catastrophic flood struck Nepal's Trishuli corridor, Chandra and five colleagues found a piece of metal sheeting to support their feet and passed it among themselves as they edged forward rung by rung. When they finally emerged, much of their clothing had been ripped away by the torrent. They were among the fortunate ones.
The scale of what remained underground became clearer over the weekend. More than 900 workers associated with hydropower projects remained missing or unaccounted for, according to Nepal's disaster authorities and industry figures, while rescue teams were operating across multiple tunnels and underground facilities devastated when a torrent of ice, rock, water and sediment swept through the Himalayan valleys on August 26. Reuters reported Sunday that rescue operations were underway at five hydropower projects, with authorities having received information that roughly 350 people could be trapped in a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli complex alone.
The men who escaped have provided a brutal picture of how quickly the underground workplaces became death traps. Chandra told CNN the rising water made it increasingly difficult to move his legs and said losing his grip on the overhead rung would probably have swept him away. Another worker, Madan Singh Budha, had just finished a night shift at Upper Trishuli when he saw the flood approaching. He ran toward a steep hillside and climbed by grabbing grass growing between rocks. Those unable to make the climb, he said, were carried away.
Survivor Bhakti Ram Bohara estimated that about 1,000 people had been working across his and nearby project sites and said only a fraction of those he knew had escaped. His brother-in-law remained missing, leaving Bohara confronting the prospect of returning to his home district of Jumla without him. Many of the workers come from poorer communities in western Nepal and spend weeks away from their families working on Himalayan infrastructure projects, sending their earnings home. CNN found that each of roughly 15 rescued workers it interviewed from Jumla had lost a relative or friend.
The rescue operation is now attempting to accomplish the reverse journey: penetrate tunnels that survivors fought desperately to escape. At the Trishuli 3A hydropower site, army engineers broke through the upper portion of a mud-filled tunnel, drilled holes and began pumping air inside. Rescuers lowered a camera and called into the darkness but initially received no response. Teams were using excavators, drilling machines, hydraulic cutters and controlled blasting to enlarge openings sufficiently for rescuers to descend.
Reuters reported Sunday that Nepal's military had airlifted heavy machinery by helicopter because roads and bridges leading to some project sites had been destroyed. Around 10,000 Nepali troops were involved in tunnel and wider rescue operations alongside specialist teams from China and India. At one Upper Trishuli operation, rescuers had reached a tunnel entrance and were preparing oxygen supplies and cameras, with a principal work area estimated to lie around 180 metres inside.
The difficulty is not simply reaching an entrance. Floodwater transformed access roads into riverbeds, buried portals beneath mud and filled underground passages with sludge. At the 22.1-MW Chilime project, rescuers managed to enter about 100 metres into a roughly 250-metre tunnel but found the remaining passage heavily clogged; two bodies were recovered there. At Upper Trishuli-1, a Chinese tunnel-rescue team was deployed Sunday, while Indian specialists including doctors, paramedics and tunnel engineers joined operations elsewhere.
Time is becoming the central enemy. Families do not know whether missing workers are alive in pockets beyond the debris, injured underground, or were swept away when the flood struck. At Upper Trishuli-1, Ram Budha has repeatedly returned to a tunnel and shouted for his 20-year-old brother Prabin, who was working underground when the disaster hit. He has received no answer. Prabin had recently finished Grade 12 and was working temporarily at the project while preparing paperwork to seek employment abroad.
The tunnel crisis is one part of a disaster of extraordinary scale. Reuters said Sunday that more than 780 people had been killed and more than 3,000 remained missing after the glacier-triggered torrent devastated communities along the Nepal-China border. The flooding also knocked out roughly 10% of Nepal's electricity-generation capacity, demonstrating how the same hydropower infrastructure built to harness Himalayan rivers became acutely vulnerable when an extreme upstream event sent ice, rock and debris through the valley.
Yet the workers' stories expose a human dimension that aggregate casualty figures cannot. Chandra survived because there happened to be overhead rungs he could hold, because his group found material beneath their feet and because they endured six hours moving toward daylight. Budha survived because he reached a hillside and found grass strong enough to pull himself upward. Others working only metres away apparently did not have those opportunities.
That is why Sunday's rescue effort carries such urgency. The men who escaped prove that workers could survive extraordinary conditions inside the tunnels — but they also demonstrate how narrow the margin between survival and disappearance was. Rescue teams are now drilling through the same mud and concrete, pumping air into sealed passages and listening for responses from hundreds whose families still do not know whether Wednesday's darkness has ended.