Nepal’s Flood Tunnels: Two Former Workers Endure Nine Days Underground Before Rescuers Break Through

By Saurabh Sharma, Sarita Chaganti Singh and Sahana Bajracharya

NUWAKOT/KATHMANDU/UPPER TRISHULI 3A HYDROPOWER STATION, Sept 8 (Reuters) – A delirious Kabir Maharjan drifted in and out of consciousness in a pool of muddy water in complete darkness, trapped for nine days in a tunnel beneath the wreckage of Nepal’s worst flood disaster in decades.

When he finally awoke at a hospital after a miracle rescue, he did not recognise his wife. Confused, he asked her why she had not given him a bed sooner.

Maharjan was one of hundreds of hydropower workers believed to have been buried when a glacier collapsed above Nepal’s Trishuli valley on August 26, unveiling a wall of mud and water that killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing across Nepal and neighbouring Tibet.

He and mechanical foreman Sanjay Sah survived in an air-filled chamber, said lawmaker Shri Ram Neupane, a veteran tunnel engineer who helped lead the rescue effort.

Their rescue against the odds has given hope to search teams working at the sites along the devastated valley that some of the 121 workers still believed to be trapped in tunnels as of Monday are still alive.

Reports have reconstructed the full story of the men’s survival and the frantic effort to save them through exclusive interviews with a dozen people, including the previously unreported accounts shared by relatives, engineers, government officials and rescuers directly involved in the operation and a review of site documents, maps, and internal conversations between rescuers.

At 7:30 a.m. (0145 GMT) on the day of the disaster, Maharjan called his wife before his shift at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project.

“I have to go inside the tunnel,” he told her. “There won’t be any network inside.”

Around 60 minutes later, a glacier collapsed at the Langtang Lirung mountain some 25 miles upstream, causing a landslide so powerful that it formed a wall of water that flattened villages and submerged a network of 12 hydropower projects with nearly 900 workers inside.

In the capital Kathmandu, electricity department officials were monitoring the projects’ power supplies on their screens. Then the fields started going blank — one after another, stations disappearing from the control panels, falling like dominoes.

Suraj Dahal, an engineer at the Nepal Electricity Authority who led parts of the rescue effort, said he was not immediately alarmed because “floods are normal” in Nepal.

They soon understood otherwise. Because the 3A station manager was abroad, it took officials two extra minutes to reach out on call to roughly 40 workers estimated to be inside. By then, at least two hydropower projects upriver had already been hit.

At 9:15 a.m. — two minutes after Maharjan’s wife, Hira Shova Maharjan, had tried and failed to reach him — officers ordered evacuation.

Sah, who worked in the power house’s control room, sped from floor to floor, warning colleagues individually, he later told rescuers.

Outside the tunnels, evacuating workers tried to run away from the flood, but were not fast enough. Officials pointed to footage showing a group of roughly 30 workers swept away by a wave many times their height.

Rescuers later identified an escape ladder which, had workers known of it, could have saved as many as two-thirds of those inside, said Dahal.

But they “didn’t know where to go,” he said.

The night before the survivors were found, rescuers encountered obstacles including mud-clogged debris and water blockages that threatened further progress.

Dhakal’s crew improvised, tapping a natural channel some 15 meters above the tunnel and forcing water through it with a high-pressure jet that cleared sections in minutes during testing.

At 4 a.m. on the tenth day, Dahal received a call from a heavy equipment operator confirming that rescuers had detected activity below—perhaps a survivor, perhaps an echo of their own voices in the darkness.

Ganga Baral, who led the rescue team, described hearing faint noises while drilling deeper. “We would call out, ‘Where are you? Are you there?’” Baral said. “Sometimes it felt like there was a person alive trying to communicate with us.”

From inside came a single word: “hunuhuncha,” loosely translated as “we are here.”

Neither man could stand when rescuers finally pulled them from the tunnel. Sah, his face caked in mud, had to be carried out on a rescue worker’s back. He managed to lift one hand toward the camera. Maharjan, with more severe injuries, was transported on a stretcher.

“Mummy, Papa is back!” his sons shouted when they heard.

Dhakal, who coordinated the operation from outside but never entered the tunnel himself, wept when the two men emerged. “I couldn’t hold my tears,” he said.

Chinese national LuHaitao was located in the adjacent Upper Trishuli‑1 Hydropower Project’s tunnel the following day.

At the hospital, doctors operated on a deep, infected wound on Maharjan’s leg, according to his wife.

When Hira Shova arrived at the hospital room, she did not recognize her husband. “Where am I?” he asked her. Yet she was simply overwhelmed with joy to have him back alive.

“He is blessed with another life.”

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