Nepal pumps oxygen into three hydropower tunnels two weeks after the flood

Nepal's disaster chief said on 8 September that rescue teams are concentrating on three hydropower tunnels where they still think workers are alive, two weeks after a glacial collapse sent a wall of water and rock down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli valleys. Dharma Raj Upreti named Chilime first, because the site had a canteen, residences and food stores. The other two are Upper Trishuli 3A and 3B, linked by one tunnel. Oxygen is being pumped in through pipes. Fresh cutting gear has gone to the portals.

Army rescuers said about 121 of some 900 missing hydropower workers could be inside tunnels. The rest may have been elsewhere on the plants when the flood hit on 26 August. At least eleven projects were buried. Tunnel mouths disappeared under mud and boulders. Early thermal drone passes found no heat. Officers said thick concrete and a landscape that no longer matches the maps can hide a living body from a drone.

Four people have come out alive in recent days. On 4 September, mechanical foreman Sanjay Sah and mechanical supervisor Kabir Maharjan were pulled from Upper Trishuli 3A after nine days in an air pocket. Lt. Col. Ganga Baral called into the dark that the army was coming. Lawmaker and tunnel engineer Shri Ram Neupane helped run that job. Sah was carried on a rescuer's back and lifted a hand to a camera. Maharjan left on a stretcher. A third man, a mechanical engineer, was found dead the same day. A Chinese national was taken from another tunnel on 6 September. A Nepali woman was pulled from a buried house that Saturday.

Sah had told rescuers more than 40 people were thought to be in his tunnel. Voices were heard beyond the two men. That is why Upreti is still sending oxygen and new kit rather than switching the sites to body recovery only. Each extra day cuts the odds. The flood itself killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal and across the border in Tibet. Thousands remain listed missing. The government doubled an early missing count after the power companies filed their own headcounts.

Getting in is a sequence. Crews dig through wet debris, then cut or blast tunnel doors and walls. India and China sent technical teams. An Australian engineer advised at Trishuli 3A. Satellite images were used to find plants that the river had redrawn. On one Saturday night Home Minister Sudan Gurung said rescuers had reached the crown of the Trishuli 3A tunnel. Friday's two survivors followed that opening.

Chilime is the new priority because people there had food. A canteen is not a guarantee. It is a reason not to walk away. Upper Trishuli 3A and 3B share a bore, which means a passage into one can, in theory, reach the other. Upreti's sentence about pipes is the operational detail that matters today. If air is moving, someone may still be breathing it.

The disaster began when a slab of glacier fell into a river on the Nepal-China border. The wave that followed was closer to a debris tsunami than a seasonal flood. Whole bends of the Bhotekoshi widened in a day. Hydropower is Nepal's export bet and its mountain risk. The same rivers that spin turbines sit under hanging ice. The 26 August collapse turned that geometry into a casualty list.

As of Tuesday morning the official posture is still rescue, not closure. One hundred and twenty-one names are the tunnel subset of a much larger missing roll. Four live recoveries in a week are why the army is still cutting. The next useful bulletin from Chilime or Trishuli will be a person, a body, or a statement that the air pipes found no one answering. Until that bulletin, the tunnels stay open files.