Two survive 9 days trapped in Nepal flood tunnel
Photo: REUTERS
A barely conscious Kabir Maharjan floated in a dark, muddy pool inside a pitch-black passage for nine days, trapped beneath the wreckage of Nepal’s worst flood disaster in decades.
When he awoke at a hospital following a miracle rescue, his clouded mind failed to recognize his own wife, leaving him to ask why she had delayed in giving him a bed.
Maharjan and mechanical foreman Sanjay Sah survived this ordeal after a glacier collapsed above the Trishuli valley on 26 August, triggering a massive wall of mud and water that killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing across Nepal and neighboring Tibet.
Lawmaker and veteran tunnel engineer Shri Ram Neupane, who spearheaded the rescue, explained that the two laborers sustained themselves inside an air-filled chamber of a cable-duct tunnel.
This near-impossible survival story has brought fresh hope to search units scouring the valley, where officials estimated on Monday that 121 workers remain trapped in tunnels. Through interviews with rescuers, engineers, relatives, and officials, we reconstructed their incredible timeline of survival.
The fateful day began at 7:30 am when Maharjan called his wife, Hira Shova Maharjan, before his shift at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project. He told her, “I have to go inside the tunnel. There won’t be any network inside.”
Roughly an hour later, a glacier collapsed at the Langtang Lirung mountain some 25 miles upstream, causing a landslide so powerful that it unleashed a wall of water, flattening villages and submerging 12 hydropower projects with nearly 900 workers inside.
In Kathmandu, electricity department officials watched screens go blank as stations fell like dominoes. Suraj Dahal, a Nepal Electricity Authority engineer who led rescue efforts, was not immediately alarmed because “floods are normal” in Nepal.
However, since the 3A manager was abroad, officials took two extra minutes to reach the roughly 40 workers inside. At 9:15 am, just minutes after Hira Shova failed to contact her husband, officials ordered: “Evacuate!” Foreman Sanjay Sah ran floor-to-floor inside the powerhouse warning colleagues individually. Outside, fleeing workers were not fast enough; footage showed about 30 workers swept away by a wave many times their height.
An escape ladder could have saved two-thirds of those inside, but they “didn’t know where to go,” said Dahal. Although a main tunnel ran over 180 meters to the underground powerhouse, rescuers assumed it was fully flooded.
Shri Ram Neupane instead focused on a shorter, upward-sloping cable-duct tunnel less exposed to floodwaters. It was there that Maharjan and Sah took shelter, just 160 meters from the exit, “at the corner, at the edge of the tunnel.”
For nine days, this air pocket became their prison. Sah recited Hindu prayers for courage, while Maharjan sipped the muddy water he slept in to stay alive. Back home, Hira Shova initially assumed the powerhouse was safe.
When calls went unanswered and officials showed her photos of a bare riverbank where the entrance once stood, she lost hope. “Deep down in my heart, a terrible hopelessness was setting in,” she recalled, but she kept a brave front for her sons, 15 and 10.
Hoping scattered oxygen pockets would help workers survive, rescuers faced difficult triage decisions with over 7,500 houses destroyed, according to Dharam Raj Uprety, chief of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
But they prioritized 3A because its multi-story turbine and ventilation structures might have trapped air. Lawmaker Sagar Dhakal and Neupane reached the site by army helicopter the next day, finding saturated debris that blocked heavy machinery. Geologist Prakash Pokhrel remarked, “Everything you drop on that place just goes under.”
Crews built a stable platform and began serious digging three days post-disaster, tackling four tunnels blocked by mud and debris buried under 15 to 30 meters (49 to 98 feet) of landslide material. They drilled, blasted, and used heavy equipment.
A five-inch borehole drilled from above confirmed the tunnel’s alignment, but heavy rains repeatedly refilled the shafts overnight. Amshu Kiran Shahi of the Nepal Electricity Authority board said it took six days to reach the buried entrance, where their calls met absolute silence.
The night before the rescue, crews hit an immovable wall of mud. Dhakal’s crew improvised, channeling water from 15 meters above with a high-pressure jet to clear several meters. After a partial landslide briefly trapped some rescuers, crews reinforced the passage with gabion wire and metal sheets.
At 4 am on the tenth day, an operator heard a noise. Drilling into the tunnel, team leader Ganga Baral heard sounds. They cut engines to listen, with Baral saying, “We would call out, ‘Where are you? Are you there?’ Sometimes it felt like there was a person alive trying to communicate with us.”
By 7 am, soldiers broke open a small hole and saw a hand. From inside came a single word: “hunuhuncha,” meaning “we are here”. Rescuers pulled both weakened men out; Sah, face caked in mud, rode out on a rescuer’s back, while a severely injured Maharjan left on a stretcher.
Outside, Dhakal wept, saying, “I couldn’t hold my tears,” as Maharjan’s sons shouted, “Mummy, Papa is back!” The next day, rescuers found Chinese national Lu Haitao alive in the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project tunnel.
At the hospital, Hira Shova celebrated her husband’s survival despite his infected leg wound and temporary memory loss. When she entered his room, he failed to recognize her, asking, “Where am I?” Yet she remained overjoyed, noting, “He is blessed with another life.”
Source: Reuters (adapted)
