Nepal search teams hunt 121 workers still thought to be in hydropower tunnels

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority recorded 1,356 dead and 4,994 missing on 7 September, twelve days after a glacier collapse sent ice, rock and mud down the Trishuli system on the Nepal-Tibet border. Rescue officers said 13,396 people had been brought out. Among the missing were at least 589 foreign nationals.

The army narrowed one part of that list. Of about 900 people still unaccounted for at hydropower sites, officers said 121 could be inside tunnels. The rest may have been working at surface plants that the flood stripped away. The tunnels have ventilation shafts, rest rooms and, in some stretches, kitchens. Families treat those fittings as a reason to keep looking.

Monday was also the thirteenth day after the disaster, the last day of formal mourning in many Hindu households. Relatives in Kathmandu held banners asking the state to name the dead and to keep pumping air into the blocked headings. Four people had already come out alive in recent days: two hydropower workers from one tunnel on Friday, a Chinese national from another tunnel on Saturday, and a Nepali woman pulled from a buried house the same day.

Shri Ram Neupane, a lawmaker working with the Rasuwa teams, told Reuters that four of six people missing at the Chilime project might still be alive. Upper Trishuli-1 had earlier been listed with hundreds of missing workers. Trishuli 3A and 3B remain the other main search points. Indian tunnel specialists are on site with Chinese and Nepali military crews. Arnold Dix, the Australian tunneller asked to advise at Upper Trishuli 3A, has said 27 stations were wiped out and that 12 left nothing standing at the surface.

The flood began on 26 August when ice and debris moved off the Himalayan border and filled the river valleys in minutes. Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha, Tanahun, Chitwan and both Nawalparasi districts have given up bodies since then. Identification is slow. The health ministry said in early September that only about 4 percent of the first 900 recovered bodies had been named. The Nepal Electricity Authority asked relatives of missing staff at Trishuli 3A to give police biological samples so that later finds can be matched.

China has published far smaller figures for the Tibetan side of the same event. That gap has become a political argument in Kathmandu, because Nepali reporting is public while Chinese numbers stay thin. The two governments still share a rescue corridor at the Gyirong crossing, which the slide itself damaged.

Power is a second problem. The plants on the Trishuli were a large slice of Nepal's generation and of its construction payroll. Contractors brought in Indian, Chinese and other crews for tunnel work. When the river rose, those crews were underground on a normal shift. Air can be pushed through some headings. Food and water cannot. After twelve days the chance of a live find falls, but the four recent rescues keep the army from treating the tunnels as graves.

NDRRMA still lists nearly 5,000 people as missing, a figure that includes tourists, truckers, students and villagers as well as plant staff. Foreign ministries in India, the United States, Ukraine, Malaysia and Australia have been told that their nationals are on the list. The Red Cross has put the affected population above 90,000.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah has called the flood unprecedented. The next useful public number is not another death total. It is a tunnel-by-tunnel count of who has been reached, who has been named, and which headings the army has written off. Until that list exists, the 121 figure is the clearest statement of what the search is still for.