Nepal rescuers blast hillside in search of hydropower workers as families wait anxiously
Explosives and Air Pumps: Nepal's Race to Reach Hundreds Trapped Beneath Flooded Hillsides
Ninoda.com – Army engineers detonated charges against a mountainside on Monday, splitting rock and earth to carve a path toward workers sealed inside a labyrinth of collapsed tunnels along the Trishuli River. The blasts were followed immediately by the rush of compressed air being forced into the Trishuli-3A hydropower complex — a desperate attempt to buy time for people who may still be breathing in the darkness below. Families of more than 600 workers believed to be buried under mud and rubble have spent days watching the clock, their hope narrowing with every hour that passes without news.
A Closing Window
Rescue coordinators have warned that the narrow physiological window in which trapped individuals can survive without oxygen is shrinking. Over the weekend, crews began pumping air into one tunnel, though grieving relatives say the intervention came far too late. Earlier on Monday, a small team managed to enter a passage leading toward one of the plants, only to pull out after finding the chamber empty. The operation, by its very nature, moves at the speed of excavation — slow, dangerous, and dependent on conditions that floodwater has made unpredictable.
"The longer it takes, the more our hope dies. This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us," said Jiban Khadka, whose relative remains trapped inside the plant. "It's a frustratingly slow operation."
Families at the Perimeter
At makeshift shelters near the disaster zone, spouses and siblings wait for information that may never come. Anushila Bhandari, whose 33-year-old husband Aurus was an engineer stationed at the project site when the floods struck, spoke of a wish she cannot yet let go of.
"I wish we could find him. I wish he would come home," she said.
Sita Pandey, whose husband was working inside the plant when the waters rose, clung to a sliver of optimism rooted in the site's engineering.
"I still have a 50% hope that he is alive because there is an oxygen system inside," she told Nepalese daily Kantipur.
Priya Kharel, waiting for word of her brother Milan — an engineer at the Upper Trishuli-1 facility — pointed to testimony from workers who made it out of the site.
"Those who returned from the hydropower site said there were people inside the tunnel. So there is hope that if the army reaches them quickly, they can be saved."
Scale of the Catastrophe
Nepal's disaster management authority placed the confirmed death toll at 939 as of Monday, while revising the number of missing persons to 3,925 — of whom 592 are foreign nationals. Roughly one in seven of the missing are believed to have been employed at the hydropower installations. Prime Minister Balendra Shah announced that 279 people had been pulled to safety from the affected sites.
The floods struck along the Nepal-Tibet border and tore through at least 11 hydropower projects, whether completed or still under construction. Each plant employs hundreds of workers spanning local labourers, migrant construction crews, and highly skilled engineers from across South Asia and beyond. Nepal's energy strategy has depended for decades on harnessing its steep, glacier-fed river systems, and the destruction of so many facilities in a single event represents a blow to both livelihoods and the national power grid.
International Muscle and Expertise
The rescue effort is led by a joint Chinese-Nepalese military team, with technical specialists from India, South Korea, and Australia embedded in the operation. Australian engineer Arnold Dix, former head of the International Tunnelling Association, has been advising Nepalese authorities remotely on locating the buried passages.
"The actual signature of them has gone – everything is just missing. It looks like a lunar landscape," Dix described the terrain to BBC Radio 4's World at One. "There's boulders bigger than houses. I've never seen that before in my life. It's just an extraordinary operation."
Once the precise locations of the power stations are confirmed, Dix explained, crews must decide the optimal access route — typically involving excavation and the blasting of boulders. He noted that the subterranean environment itself may have shielded trapped workers from the full force of the surface deluge, lending cautious weight to the hope that some remain alive.
Climate Change in the Himalaya
Shah characterized the event as "not an ordinary" disaster and used a late-Monday social media post to frame it within a broader geopolitical argument.
"This incident indicates that the risks we face in the Himalayan region are increasing alongside climate change. It is now time for us to strongly raise with the international community the issue of the disasters we are experiencing as a result of climate change."
The statement positions Nepal's suffering within the ongoing debate over climate accountability, particularly for nations that contribute least to global emissions yet bear disproportionate physical consequences from glacial melt, intensified monsoon rainfall, and destabilized mountain geology.
Identification and Downstream Aftermath
Only about 4 percent of the roughly 900 bodies recovered so far have been formally identified, a Ministry of Health spokesperson confirmed. In Chitwan district, far downstream from the initial impact zone, rivers carried nearly 300 unidentified corpses to their banks. Men in white protective gear and face masks carried the remains into trucks for makeshift burials, while the air carried the heavy scent of decomposition. For families still waiting at the hillside perimeter, the absence of a name attached to a body means the search — and the grief — continues.
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