Nepal's missing hydropower tunnel workers and the Rasuwagadhi search that found nobody inside

Rescuers went the whole length of the Rasuwagadhi tunnel and found nobody inside. A Nepali Army team reached the far end of the roughly 250-metre tunnel at the 111 MW Rasuwagadhi Hydropower Project on Monday 31 August, searched it with a drone, and came back out reporting no signs of human presence. That is not the relief it sounds like. Ninety-three people attached to the project are still untraced, and most of them were never in the tunnel at all.

That one result explains why the search after the 26 August Bhote Koshi flood has been so agonising to follow. The tunnels are the places where a rescue is still technically imaginable. The staff quarters, the dam sites and the headworks are where most of the missing actually were when the water arrived before office hours, and the flood took those whole. We have already covered what the flood did to Rasuwagadhi and Nepal's only road to Tibet. This piece is about the men who were working there.

What the numbers actually say

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put Nepal's toll at 903 dead and 4,247 missing on 31 August, with 10,451 people rescued and 592 foreign nationals among the missing. Uniformed personnel are in that list too, which tells you how completely the valley was overrun. Forty-five Nepal Army, 25 Nepal Police, 13 Armed Police Force, 15 Customs and three Immigration staff are unaccounted for.

Project by project, and what has changed since

The Independent Power Producers' Association Nepal counted 934 unaccounted for across 11 projects on 29 August. Below is the picture the companies gave then, and what has happened at each site since. Every figure is provisional.

Where the rescue has actually reached

The individual accounts are bleak in the same specific way. Baburaj Maharjan, executive director of Chilime Hydropower, said flatly, "We have not been able to carry out a rescue. The tunnel is filled with mud, and it is impossible to enter." When his tunnel was finally opened, Nepali Army spokesperson Brigadier General Rajaram Basnet reported, "The joint team reached 100 metres into the 250-metre-long tunnel. We could not find any living people up to that point."

At Upper Trishuli-3A the army broke in through the top of the tunnel rather than the mouth. "After drilling a hole, we found that the water level extends high up inside a tunnel with a diameter of around seven metres," Basnet said. Rescuers shouted into the opening and got nothing back. On the wider effort he has been blunt about the obstacle, "A large amount of debris has been deposited and that is posing us a big challenge to open the tunnels."

At Rasuwagadhi, information officer Narayan Nath Neupane had pointed at a building rather than the tunnel. "We estimate that three to six people may be inside the six- or seven-storey underground powerhouse," he said, having earlier reported 56 or 57 people at the dam site and powerhouse with no contact from any of them.

Why it took five days to get the right equipment

Nepal did not have what this rescue needed. Subas Chandra Baral, president of the Nepal Engineers' Association, said the country lacked the specialised skills, equipment and capacity required for large-scale tunnel rescue operations. Indian and Chinese teams only began work on Sunday 30 August, five days in. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that permission for foreign rescuers was delayed. South Korea, the United Kingdom and Australia also offered help.

The industry's own voice has been the loudest. Bijaya Mohan Bhattarai, promoter of Langtang Hydropower, said, "Forty-two people are still unaccounted for. The government must make their rescue a priority," and explained why nobody could simply drive there, "Bridges at several points leading to the project have been swept away. There is no way to get there by road." Rajan Dhakal, spokesperson for the Nepal Electricity Authority, summarised the week in one sentence, "An unimaginable loss of life and property has occurred."

The people who are actually missing

It is worth being clear about who these workers are, because the coverage keeps sliding into megawatts. They are overwhelmingly Nepali and Indian labourers on rotation, living in site quarters for weeks at a stretch and wiring money home to villages a long way from Rasuwa. They were not on a mountain. They were asleep, or eating, or walking to a shift, in a valley that had no reason to expect a wall of water at that hour. Their families are now waiting on a search that has so far returned four bodies and a great deal of silence.

What this means for trekkers

Have any tunnel workers been found alive?

Yes, but not recently. Roughly 300 people were brought out of the tunnels in the first days, including 254 at Upper Trishuli-1 and 85 at Upper Trishuli-3. Since the foreign teams began work on 30 August the tunnels opened have produced four bodies and no survivors.

Why did the Rasuwagadhi tunnel search find nobody?

Because only about three people were thought to have been inside it. The rest of the workforce was at the dam site, the underground powerhouse and the residential quarters when the flood struck before office hours.

How many hydropower workers are still missing?

933 on 31 August, across roughly a dozen damaged projects in Rasuwa and Nuwakot. The figure is provisional and has been revised repeatedly as headcounts are reconciled.

Is the rest of Nepal's trekking season affected?

Only Langtang and Rasuwa. The Everest and Annapurna regions are open and the autumn season is proceeding. See our note on what the lost generating capacity means for power supply if you are wondering about winter load-shedding.

We will update this piece as more tunnels are opened. To see what the valley looks like now, we have published seven photographs from Rasuwa and Nuwakot, and the 14-day Everest Base Camp trek is running normally this autumn.