Nepali rescue teams, working alongside Chinese and Indian specialists, stepped up efforts on Monday to reach hundreds of workers believed trapped inside hydropower tunnels blocked by last week’s Himalayan flood, Ada Derana reported carrying Reuters copy.
The search is concentrated on 933 workers thought to be trapped at 11 hydropower projects in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, the two worst-hit districts. Many of them were working inside about half a dozen tunnels when the torrent of ice, rock and mud came down the valley on Wednesday.
Teams recovered three bodies after entering two tunnels. Other sections remain buried in mud and are still being searched.
Crews are now blasting their way in
The Nepali army said search-and-rescue teams were using controlled blasts, excavators and searchlights to clear water and mud. Photographs and video released by rescuers showed earth-moving equipment digging under floodlights at night, and soldiers using torches in a pit dug to find a way into one tunnel.
“A large amount of debris has been deposited and that is posing us a big challenge to open the tunnels,” army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet said. “Our main focus is on opening the tunnels.”
That marks a change in method. Two days earlier, Dharam Raj Uprety, who heads Nepal’s national disaster management authority, had ruled the option out. “It’s very tough because there’s a lot of debris and we cannot blast things to make our way through,” he said on Sunday, in an earlier Reuters filing carried by Hiru News. Neither report explains what changed. Uprety put the number of Nepali troops assigned to tunnel work at about 10,000.
The scale of the tunnel search has also widened sharply. Sunday’s account described operations at five hydroelectric projects and around 350 people feared trapped at the Upper Trishuli complex, of whom 35 to 40 were thought to be inside Tunnel 3A. By Monday the count stood at 933 across 11 projects. Upper Trishuli 3A and 3B are interconnected plants on the Trishuli river spanning Nuwakot and Rasuwa — the same two districts named in Monday’s report.
Rescuers reached the mouth of one tunnel on Sunday and began clearing debris, the first breakthrough in the effort. The army released a photograph of two men caked in mud after being pulled from a tunnel entrance.
Nepal accepted foreign help only for the tunnels
Nepal has said it does not need outside assistance for general search and rescue, but has drawn on India and China for tunnel expertise specifically — both airlifted specialised teams. That distinction is consistent with Kathmandu’s earlier decision to turn back several foreign rescue contingents.
Hydropower building has boomed in Nepal since the turn of the century as the country sought to use its Himalayan rivers to end chronic power shortages and sell electricity to India. The steep terrain means projects depend on tunnels to carry water between rivers and powerhouses, which is why so many workers were underground when the flood arrived. Sunday’s filing said the disaster knocked out roughly 10 per cent of Nepal’s generating capacity.
Work has been halted repeatedly by bad weather and by fears that a lake formed on the Nepal-China border could send fresh water downstream, a risk assessed as receding late last week. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said on Monday that glaciers around the crater left by the collapse remain unstable, and that drone footage showed landslide deposits along both riverbanks that could form new lakes.
The toll, and a dispute over warnings
Nepali authorities put the confirmed dead at 903 on Monday and the missing at 4,247, a figure that includes the 933 hydropower workers. China reported 16 dead and 546 missing in Gyirong County. Those numbers are covered in full in our running account of the toll.
Nepal’s foreign ministry said about 590 foreign nationals from 39 countries were still missing, and that more than 10,000 people had been rescued from the flood zone, including 323 foreigners. The Red Cross estimates more than 90,000 people were affected. Prime Minister Balendra Shah called the flood an “unprecedented and devastating natural disaster” and said a full damage assessment was still not possible.
Two Nepali officials told Reuters that China had not shared much information on glacier risks and water levels after a meeting earlier this year meant to strengthen cooperation, and said they feared the gap could hamper future preparedness. China’s foreign ministry responded that it had continuously supplied Nepal with meteorological and hydrological data and would keep supporting the relief effort. CCTV said the flood was caused by glacier instability “under the long-term effects of global warming”.
Neither report said how many of the 933 workers are believed to be inside tunnels rather than elsewhere on the project sites, how long anyone trapped could survive, or whether contact has been established with any of them.
