Two men rescued from flood-stricken Nepali power plant where scores feared trapped

Nine Days After the Flood: Voices Emerge From Nepal’s Buried Power Tunnels

Healfromzero.com – For nearly a week, the silence beneath the Himalayan foothills of central Nepal had grown heavier than the rubble above. Then, on the ninth day since catastrophic flash floods and cascading landslides swallowed entire construction sites along the Trishuli River valley, two workers were pulled alive from the depths of the Trishuli 3A hydropower plant. Moments later, rescuers confirmed they had heard voices from within the same tunnel network — a development that reignited cautious hope in a rescue operation that had been running around the clock under some of the most hostile terrain in South Asia.

A Narrow Opening, a Desperate Pull

The breakthrough came through a bore-hole operation aimed at reaching a sealed section of tunnel where 42 workers remained unaccounted for. Footage captured at the scene showed roughly a dozen rescue personnel hauling a man through a small aperture in the earth, their hands slick with mud, before the crowd erupted in applause as he surfaced into daylight. A second individual followed in rapid succession. Bipin Regmi, the police chief overseeing operations in the devastated Nuwakot district, confirmed the extractions and noted that a medical team was already en route to the site.

The tunnel in question stretches more than four kilometers — over two and a half miles — from its surface entrance to the underground powerhouse where dozens of laborers were on shift when the flood struck. That distance, combined with collapsed sections, debris-choked passages, and unstable ground, has made every meter of progress a negotiation with gravity and geology.

The Scale of the Trishuli Disaster

The Trishuli River, one of Nepal’s principal waterways feeding the country’s ambitious hydropower pipeline, turned into a torrent of sediment-laden, cement-like floodwater that obliterated riverbanks, villages, and construction camps across multiple districts. The death toll across Nepal has surpassed 1,200. Authorities estimate that more than 900 workers remain missing across several Himalayan energy projects, a figure that includes nationals from China, South Korea, and India — countries whose firms have long supplied labor and technical expertise to Nepal’s booming but fragile power sector.

Nepal’s dependence on hydropower for both domestic electricity and export revenue to neighboring India makes disasters of this magnitude not merely humanitarian crises but economic shocks. The Trishuli basin alone hosts a chain of dams and tunnels designed to convert the river’s steep gradient into megawatts. When the infrastructure that houses those workers is buried under meters of floodwater and landslide debris, the rescue problem becomes one of geology as much as medicine.

What the Clock Demands

Time inside a collapsed tunnel operates on a different physiology than time in open air. Parikshit Mehra, an Indian army colonel who was leading a specialized rescue team at the Trishuli 3A site, explained the brutal arithmetic to Anderson Cooper, who had reported from the location earlier in the week:

“The first 48 hours are the most crucial. People who are stuck tend to panic much more than when they are outside in the open. Getting stuck in a tunnel you can’t see anything. Generally if you stay in the dark you get disoriented in about 24-25 hours. Beyond that, (after) 48 hours, you start hallucinating. And then I think from there on it’s always a fight.”

Mehra’s assessment underscores why the ninth-day emergence of voices is both extraordinary and urgent. At that point, trapped individuals face dehydration, hypothermia in cold mountain tunnels, psychological fragmentation, and the ever-present risk of secondary collapse. Every additional hour narrows the window in which a survivor can be extracted in a condition compatible with survival.

Yet Mehra closed his remarks with a note that has echoed through the rescue camps:

“There have been miracles.”

What Comes Next

With two workers confirmed alive and voices still audible, the bore-hole operation at Trishuli 3A is expected to continue through the coming days, supported by international engineering teams and Nepali military units. The broader search across the Trishuli corridor — where multiple plants and access tunnels remain partially or fully buried — will require weeks of systematic excavation, drone surveying, and acoustic monitoring. Families of the missing, gathered in temporary shelters across Nuwakot and neighboring districts, have been told to expect incremental updates rather than a single definitive resolution.

Nepal’s government faces the parallel task of assessing structural integrity across the affected hydropower portfolio, a question that will shape both the pace of reconstruction and the country’s near-term electricity supply. Until the tunnels are cleared and every worker accounted for, the silence beneath the hills remains the defining sound of this disaster — and every voice that breaks through it rewrites the arithmetic of what is still possible.