KATHMANDU, Nepal: Families of more than 600 workers believed to be trapped inside mud-filled tunnels at hydropower projects along Nepal’s Trishuli River are clinging to hope as rescuers race to reach them following devastating floods and landslides.
Rescue teams continued efforts on Monday at the Trishuli-3A site, using explosives to clear a path through the hillside before pumping air into the tunnels amid fears that the window for finding survivors is rapidly closing.
“I wish we could find him. I wish he would come home,” Anushila Bhandari, whose 33-year-old engineer husband Aurus Bhandari is missing from the project site, told the BBC.
The wider disaster has killed at least 939 people along the Nepal-China border, according to Nepal’s disaster management authority.
The agency has revised the number of people reported missing to 3,925, including 592 foreign nationals.
About one in seven of those missing are believed to be workers at hydropower plants. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said on Monday that 279 people had been rescued from the sites.
Race To Reach Trapped Workers
An international rescue effort involving Chinese and Nepalese military personnel is leading the search, with experts from India, South Korea and Australia also taking part.
Each hydropower plant employs hundreds of workers, including local and migrant labourers as well as highly skilled engineers.
Sita Pandey, whose husband was working at one of the plants when the floods struck, said she still believed he could be alive.
“I still have a 50% hope that he is alive because there is an oxygen system inside,” she told the Nepalese newspaper Kantipur.
Rescuers began pumping air into a tunnel over the weekend, but relatives of those trapped said the measure should have been introduced sooner.
A rescue team managed to enter a tunnel leading to one hydropower plant on Monday but withdrew after finding no workers inside.
“The longer it takes, the more our hope dies. This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us,” Jiban Khadka, whose relative is trapped inside a plant, told Kantipur.
“It’s a frustratingly slow operation,” he added.
‘Extraordinary’ Rescue Operation
Mr Shah said rescue operations had been intensified, describing the floods as an event that was “not ordinary”.
“This incident indicates that the risks we face in the Himalayan region are increasing alongside climate change,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
He called for the international community to pay greater attention to the disasters affecting the Himalayan region as a result of climate change.
Priya Kharel is also waiting for news of her brother Milan, an engineer who was working at the Upper Trishuli-1 plant when the floods struck.
“Those who returned from the hydropower site said there were people inside the tunnel,” she told BBC News Nepali.
“So there is hope that if the army reaches them quickly, they can be saved.”
Australian engineer Arnold Dix, who has been advising Nepalese authorities remotely on the underground search, said rescuers were struggling to locate the tunnels.
“The actual signature of them has gone – everything is just missing. It looks like a lunar landscape,” he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.
Mr Dix said rescuers first needed to establish the locations of the power stations before determining how best to reach them, a process that can involve digging and blasting through rocks.
“There are boulders bigger than houses. I’ve never seen that before in my life. It’s just an extraordinary operation,” said Mr Dix, a former head of the International Tunnelling Association.
He said there was still some hope for those trapped underground because the tunnels could have provided some protection from the floodwaters above.
Bodies Recovered But Few Identified
The scale of the disaster has complicated efforts to identify those who died.
Only 4% of the roughly 900 bodies recovered so far have been identified, a spokesperson for Nepal’s Ministry of Health told BBC Nepali.
In Chitwan district, far downstream from the areas first hit by the floods, authorities have resorted to temporary burials after nearly 300 bodies were carried to the riverbanks.
Medical workers and volunteers have been collecting DNA samples from unidentified remains in an effort to match them with relatives.
Ganesh Aryaal, Chitwan’s chief district officer, said families would be able to recover their relatives’ remains once DNA testing had established their identities.
“We don’t have enough freezers here… We had to choose this last alternative of a temporary burial system. We are really overwhelmed,” he said.
Death Toll In China
In China, state media has reported 16 deaths and 546 people missing.
Footage and information about the floods have been heavily restricted in China. Chinese authorities have imposed “administrative penalties” on people accused of speculating online that the official casualty figures are significantly higher.
Nepalese authorities have also ordered the removal of online material they consider to be misinformation about the floods.
