‘Layer upon layer of miracles’: How Nepal flood survivors were rescued from tunnel
Two Men Pulled Alive from a Buried Hydropower Tunnel After Days of Digging Through Flood Debris
Constantvpn.com – In the small hours of a Friday morning, rescuers working inside a collapsed mountain tunnel in Nepal heard what they believed were human voices. They called out reassurances into the darkness. A faint reply came back: "okay." Minutes later, two men — Sanjaya Shah and Kabir Maharjan — were dragged through a narrow crawl-space no wider than a single body, alive after days trapped beneath tonnes of mud, shattered rock, and rushing water. Their extraction marked the first confirmed survival from one of the most complex underground rescue operations ever attempted in the Himalayan foothills.
The men had been sealed inside the Trishuli 3A Hydropower Station when a catastrophic flash flood tore across the Nepal-Tibet border region the previous week. That single event has claimed at least 1,300 lives across multiple districts, obliterated roads and bridges, and buried entire valleys under debris. Among the structures swallowed by the deluge were several hydropower installations, and Trishuli 3A became the most urgent of them because workers were known to have been inside when the water hit.
The Man Advising the Dig
Overseeing the technical strategy for reaching the buried station was Arnold Dix, president of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, who had been brought in to advise Nepal's hydropower authorities on how to bore through the collapsed structure. Dix framed the operation in terms that captured both its difficulty and its improbability:
"It's like layer upon layer of layer of miracles" that they found two men on Friday, given that the multiple challenges they faced.
Each "layer" represented a distinct engineering problem that had to be solved before the next could even be attempted. No single discipline — geology, hydrology, explosives engineering, surveying — could have cracked the operation alone.
Finding an Entrance That No Longer Existed
The very first obstacle was locating the tunnel mouth itself. The flood and accompanying avalanche had so radically reshaped the mountainside that the entrance, once perched on a hillside, now sat beneath the surface. Dix noted that he had never encountered a rescue scenario in which the starting point of the operation had to be rediscovered from scratch.
"I've never known a rescue operation where you had to look for an entrance of a tunnel that was previously up the hill, that was now underground. You can imagine the enormity of the avalanche, it completely buried the entrance."
His team triangulated the probable location by cross-referencing pre-disaster topographic maps with post-event satellite imagery, helicopter video footage, and any surviving surface markers — power poles, fence lines, drainage channels — still visible above the debris field. Once a likely coordinate was established, excavation began.
Clearing a Tunnel Choked by Boulders and Water
Reaching the entrance was only the threshold. Beyond it lay a bore completely occluded by flood-borne sediment and rock fragments some larger than passenger vehicles. Conventional excavation equipment could not advance through material of that density, so the team made the decision to employ controlled blasting — a step Dix described as unusual in a live-occupancy scenario because of the risk of detonating near trapped persons or destabilising the surrounding rock.
"We had to use explosives which we normally never do because of the risk of blowing up people [trapped in the tunnel] and blowing ourselves up."
The Nepalese army handled the charge placement and detonation sequencing with what Dix called "a wonderful job," calibrating each blast to fracture the obstruction without shaking the tunnel walls loose. Simultaneously, crews discovered that the bore still held a substantial volume of standing water. Excavators and pumping units were deployed to cut a series of drainage trenches from the tunnel floor outward to the river beyond, allowing the water to be evacuated before further advance became possible.
The Crawl-Space and the Voices
Even after the main obstruction was cleared and the water drawn down, the upper portion of the tunnel remained packed with debris. The solution was to excavate a secondary passage — what Dix termed "a tiny tunnel the size of a person" — along the crown of the original bore. This upper route had two practical advantages: it used the existing tunnel roof as its own ceiling, reducing collapse risk, and it kept the dig above the water table, mitigating further flooding.
It was through this cramped passage that rescuers made contact with the two survivors in the pre-dawn hours of Friday. Local accounts describe the exchange: rescuers shouted that help had arrived; the trapped men answered with a quiet acknowledgment. Shah and Maharjan were then physically pulled through the narrow gap to safety.
What Remains: 150 Metres and the "Goldilocks Zone"
By the time the two men were out, the team had advanced roughly 60 metres from the recovered entrance. The Trishuli 3A station itself sits approximately another 150 metres deeper into the mountain. Dozens of workers are still believed to be inside, and the operation continues around the clock.
Dix described the target area as a "Goldilocks zone" — the uppermost level of the station where headroom exists and where survivors, if any remain, would most plausibly be sheltered above the flood line. He acknowledged the compounding hazards ahead: fresh water inflow from the front, the ever-present possibility of another flood pulse arriving from behind, and the structural uncertainty of a mountain that has already been shaken by one catastrophic event.
"Up ahead, even now, we might run into water which would drown the people tunnelling. And we also have the risk of another flood outside happening, so water could come from behind. So there's the risk of facing water on both ends."
Still, the Friday rescue injected a measure of confidence into the team. Dix said the success confirmed that their methodological assumptions were sound — that they were, in his words, "on the right track" — and that it supplied "renewed energy" for the next phase.
"We got two people out. If we were playing at a casino, some might say it's time to walk away, but we say game on, time to take on the house."
Nepal's Hydropower Gamble and Its Fragile Infrastructure
The Trishuli 3A incident sits within a broader pattern. Nepal's economy leans heavily on hydropower, and dozens of stations are scattered through narrow, steep valleys where a single monsoon pulse or glacial lake outburst can transform a river into a wall of water within minutes. Many of these installations were designed to standards that predate current seismic and hydrological risk modelling, and their access tunnels — often bored through unstable Himalayan schist and sandstone — are vulnerable to the very floods they are meant to harness. The 1,300 deaths from last week's event underscore how quickly infrastructure meant to deliver electricity can become a burial site when the mountain decides otherwise. For the families still waiting outside the Trishuli 3A bore, the next 150 metres of rock represent the difference between a rescue and a memorial.
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