Two men walk out of the Trishuli-3A tunnel ten days after the Bhotekoshi flood

Sanjay Sah and Kabir Maharjan came out of the Upper Trishuli 3A tunnel alive on Friday, 4 September. Nepali Army and Armed Police Force teams pulled them after voices were heard inside the passage the day before. Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha first told reporters that one man had been brought out. Home Minister Sudan Gurung then confirmed a second.

Sah, from Saptari, had been on shift operations at the plant. Maharjan, from Kathmandu, had come over from the Kulekhani project for scheduled maintenance. Rescuers said they found the two about halfway along the access tunnel. The government released photographs of both men on stretchers under helmet lamps. Amir Maharjan, Kabir’s brother, told AFP his chest felt lighter. He had waited ten days.

The flood that sealed the tunnel ran on 26 August. A glacial collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border sent ice, rock and mud down the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli basin. Official death counts passed 1,250 earlier this week, with thousands still listed missing. More than 900 of the missing were tied to hydropower sites. By mid-week the Nepal Electricity Authority and the army had already brought 279 people out of other project areas. Until Friday, no one had been confirmed alive inside the Trishuli-3A workings themselves.

The plant is a 60-megawatt run-of-river station on the Trishuli in Rasuwa, financed in part by a China Exim Bank loan and owned by the Nepal Electricity Authority. After the surge, the outlet sat under collapsed steel and a debris pile described as 40 metres long and 20 metres high. A 93-member group, including a Chinese team and five excavators, spent days draining standing water and cutting a crown blast around 2 a.m. to widen the hole. Engineer Shriram Neupane, a Rastriya Swatantra Party lawmaker working on site, said human voices on Thursday morning changed the pace of the dig.

Arnold Dix, an Australian tunnel specialist advising the government, had told officials that people in a dry chamber with air could last as long as 17 days. Amshu Kiran Shahi of the Nepal Electricity Authority had separately said 46 workers might still be in a room-like space at the 111-megawatt Rasuwagadhi plant, three miles from the Tibetan border, because food and water were stored there. That chamber has not been reached. At Langtang Khola, teams recovered two bodies. At Chilime, a mixed foreign-Nepali group is still working. The geography of each tunnel is different. A live rescue at Trishuli-3A does not settle Rasuwagadhi.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah has already tied the disaster to a warming climate. UNICEF said at least 22,000 children in the basin need safe water. Reconstruction estimates circulating in Kathmandu run as high as $5 billion. Those figures will move. The immediate question is how many more dry pockets exist and how fast the remaining sludge can be moved without collapsing what is left of the linings.

Friday’s two names change the search from a recovery assumption to a live hunt. They do not change the arithmetic of the missing. Voices heard once can go quiet. The next hours at Trishuli-3A, Rasuwagadhi, Langtang and Chilime will show whether Sah and Maharjan were the first of a group or the only two who found air.