A DELIRIOUS Kabir Maharjan drifted in and out of consciousness in a pool of muddy water in complete darkness, trapped for nine days beneath the wreckage of Nepal’s worst flood disaster in decades.
When he finally awoke in hospital after a miracle rescue, he did not recognise his wife. Confused, he asked her why she had not given him a bed sooner.
Maharjan was one of hundreds of hydropower workers believed to have been buried when a glacier collapsed above Nepal’s Trishuli Valley on Aug 26, unleashing a wall of mud and water that killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing across Nepal and neighbouring Tibet.
He and mechanical foreman Sanjay Sah survived in an air-filled chamber, said lawmaker Shri Ram Neupane, a veteran tunnel engineer who helped lead the rescue effort.
Their survival has given hope to search teams working at sites along the devastated valley, where 121 workers were still believed to be trapped in tunnels as of Sept 7.
The fateful morning
At 7.30am on the day of the disaster, Maharjan called his wife before his shift at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project.
“I have to go inside the tunnel,” he told her. “There won’t be any network inside.”
About an hour later, a glacier collapsed at Langtang Lirung mountain, some 40km upstream, triggering a landslide so powerful it formed a wall of water that flattened villages and submerged 12 hydropower projects with nearly 900 workers inside.
In the capital Kathmandu, electricity department officials watched the projects’ power supplies disappear from their screens, one after another.
They soon realised something was seriously wrong.
At 9.15am – two minutes after Maharjan’s wife had tried and failed to reach him – officials gave the final order to 3A: “Evacuate!”
Sah, who worked in the powerhouse control room, raced from floor to floor, warning colleagues individually.
Outside, workers tried to outrun the flood but were swept away.
Officials later identified an escape ladder that, had workers known about it, could have saved as many as two-thirds of those inside.
Of the tunnel’s four access routes, engineering drawings showed one ran more than 180m to the underground powerhouse. Rescuers believed it was flooded.
Neupane instead turned his attention to a shorter cable-duct tunnel that sloped upwards and was less exposed to the floodwaters.
It was there that Maharjan and Sah had taken shelter, just 160m from the exit.
Fear of the worst
For the next nine days, the air pocket that had saved their lives became their prison. Sah recited Hindu prayers to keep his courage. Maharjan sipped the muddy water he slept in to stay alive, his wife said.
When Hira Shova first heard about the flood, she assumed the powerhouse would be safe. She called her husband, his colleagues and anyone else who might know something.
No one answered.
When officials later showed her photographs of where the site entrance had been – now a bare riverbank – she told herself, “He couldn’t possibly be alive.”
“Deep down in my heart, a terrible hopelessness was setting in,” she recalled.
But to her sons, aged 15 and 10, she kept up a brave front.
Race against the mountain
Officials believed pockets of oxygen trapped inside the wreckage might have allowed some workers to survive.
But rescuers faced a daunting task.
More than 15m of landslide material buried parts of the site, while the saturated debris was too unstable for heavy machinery.
Crews first had to build a stable platform before excavation could begin.
Serious digging started three days after the disaster.
Rescuers used drilling, controlled blasting and heavy equipment to inch their way towards the buried tunnels.
A breakthrough came when a 12.5cm borehole drilled from above confirmed the tunnel’s alignment, giving crews a fixed point to dig towards.
Rain repeatedly made matters worse, refilling excavated shafts with water and debris and undoing hours of work in minutes.
It took nearly six days just to reach the tunnel’s buried entrance, said Amshu Kiran Shahi, a board member of the Nepal Electricity Authority.
When rescuers called out for survivors, nobody answered.
The breakthrough
The night before the survivors were found, rescuers hit a wall of mud-clogged debris they could not move.
Dhakal’s crew improvised, finding a natural channel about 15m above the tunnel and forcing water through it with a high-pressure jet.
The technique cleared several metres of debris in minutes during testing.
Then the rain came again, triggering a partial collapse that briefly trapped several rescuers themselves.
The operation stalled for hours before crews reinforced the passage and resumed work.
At 4am on the 10th day, Suraj Dahal, an engineer with the Nepal Electricity Authority who was helping lead the rescue, received a call from a heavy-equipment operator.
The rescuers had heard something.
A noise. Perhaps a survivor. Perhaps only an echo of their own voices calling into the darkness.
On the ground, Ganga Baral, who led the rescue team, said they repeatedly stopped their machines to listen.
“We would call out, ‘Where are you? Are you there?’” Baral said.
“Sometimes it felt like there was a person alive trying to communicate with us.”
They still could not make out words, but estimated the source was just 15-20m away.
Then, in the beam of a light, they saw a hand.
Another 5-10m of mud-choked passage remained between them and the survivor.
By 7am, soldiers had broken open a small hole.
From inside came a single word: “Hunuhuncha” – loosely translated as “We are here”.
Into the light
Neither man could stand when rescuers finally pulled them from the tunnel.
Sah, his face caked in mud, had to be carried out on a rescuer’s back. He managed to raise one hand towards a camera.
Maharjan, with more severe injuries, was carried out on a stretcher.
“Mummy, Papa is back!” his sons shouted when they heard.
Dhakal, who ran the operation from outside, wept when the two men emerged.
“I couldn’t hold my tears,” he said.
The following day, Chinese national Lu Haitao was found alive in a tunnel at the separate Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project.
At the hospital, doctors operated on an infected wound on Maharjan’s leg, his wife said.
When Shova walked into his room, he did not recognise her.
“Where am I?” he asked.
She was simply thrilled to have him back alive.
“He is blessed with another life.” — Reuters
