Rescuers rappel into Nepal hydropower tunnels in desperate search for flood survivors

Late Sunday, rescue teams began their descent into the Upper Trishuli-3A hydropower tunnel in Nepal, rappelling through a two-foot-wide hole that had been drilled through the tunnel's reinforced exterior. They were searching for workers who might still be alive, trapped somewhere in the kilometers-long passage since a catastrophic flood swept through the region days earlier. The rescuers called out into the darkness, their voices echoing through the cavern, but heard nothing in return.

The operation represents one of the most urgent priorities for Nepali authorities in the aftermath of Wednesday's disaster, which began when a glacier roughly 2,000 feet wide sheared off Langtang Lirung mountain in northern Nepal. The collapse triggered a landslide that sent a violent mixture of ice, water, rock, sediment, and boulders the size of cars plummeting 7,000 feet downward through narrow gorges. The force was so tremendous that it initially registered as an earthquake. This torrent—described by some as "liquid concrete"—obliterated homes, buildings, power plants, bridges, and roads across the Nepal-China border region, and entire villages were washed away.

By Sunday, 90 personnel had been deployed to the Upper Trishuli-3A site alone, including members of the Nepal Army, Nepal Police, and Armed Police Force, along with sniffer dogs and search-and-rescue teams. Before the rappelling operation began, rescue workers had pumped air into the tunnel and sent food inside. The team's plan was to reach a suspected working space approximately 180 meters into the tunnel from the entrance, where they could assess conditions on the ground, locate the trapped individuals if they were still there, and evaluate whether the environment was safe enough for a sustained rescue effort.

Meanwhile, the scale of death across the region became grimly apparent. Rescue crews had recovered 272 unidentified bodies originating from Tibet, many of them swept downstream by the floodwaters toward Chitwan, a district in southern Nepal that borders India. The remains were discovered along riverbanks in the southern plains. But the infrastructure to process them had collapsed under the volume. Medical facilities ran out of preservation equipment needed for DNA testing, forcing officials in southern Nepal to bury 199 unidentified bodies in a forest over recent days. "Bodies are still being recovered," local police inspector Anil Thapa told CNN on Sunday. "But we want to manage those dead bodies to avoid the risk of fast decomposition." The lack of DNA collection equipment had delayed the burial process, he added, but the alternative—allowing remains to decompose in the heat—posed its own public health crisis.

Rescue operations faced compounding hazards. A barrier lake created by the landslide had caused significant concern for rescue teams in recent days, though it had been largely emptied by Sunday. But water was continuously flowing from a crater left by the glacial collapse, posing ongoing risks to water-logged areas downstream. Chinese authorities identified eight "high-risk geological disaster points" around the Gyirong Port area in Tibet for intensive monitoring. The Ministry of Natural Resources called for drone surveys and manual patrols to conduct risk assessments and provide early warning of possible collapses and landslides. Mud-filled sludge was hampering rescue work across both sides of the border, and heavy rainfall was adding to the quagmire, according to a police official in Kathmandu who spoke to China's state broadcaster.

Foreign rescue teams were working to clear and search other hydropower projects scattered along the Trishuli River, which winds through multiple districts. An Indian team was monitoring the Chilime and Langtang areas by helicopter, while a Chinese team had already searched the tunnel of the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project. On Sunday, authorities met with the families of missing workers and told them the government "is leaving no stone unturned to save the lives of its citizens." Weather forecasts for Monday and Tuesday called for light rains and showers—additional precipitation that could trigger secondary flooding and landslides in terrain already destabilized by the initial disaster.

What occurred on Wednesday was, according to Prashant Baral, a cryosphere analyst at ICIMOD, a Nepali climate organization, "of significantly larger scale than what we have seen in the recent past." Nepal has long been a hotspot for flooding and landslides, its landscape of jagged peaks and narrow valleys carved by powerful rivers creating inherent dangers for the millions who live downstream of the Himalayan glaciers. But the scale and speed of this event—the sheer volume of material mobilized, the distance it traveled, the villages it erased—suggested something had shifted. Living in the shadow of the world's most spectacular mountains has always carried risks, but the disaster unfolding across the Nepal-China border this week illustrated how that risk was becoming more unpredictable and more deadly.