Arnold Dix is a geologist in Australia. He has been advising rescue teams in Nepal's Trishuli valley since Saturday, reviewing technical drawings, satellite images and aerial videos, trying to determine the best way to access tunnels that may contain living workers. He has spent a career entering collapsed structures to recover survivors. What he described to CNN and ABC Australia on Monday was different: 'Normally, they collapse and I'm trying to get people out. This time, they haven't collapsed, but everything around them has, and I'm trying to get in.' It has removed the power stations from the surface, he said. Like they're just not there.
The flash floods triggered on August 26 when part of a glacier collapsed near Nepal's border with Tibet were the worst natural disaster to hit Nepal in years. The glacier was 3,000 feet wide. It fell 4,000 feet into a river valley, releasing a wall of water, ice, mud and debris that barrelled 62 miles downstream. It killed more than 750 people, left more than 3,000 missing and buried entire communities beneath layers of sediment so thick that the landscape was fundamentally altered. The rivers that feed Nepal's hydropower grid run through exactly the territory the glacier destroyed.
Nepal has built extensively along those rivers. The Trishuli River and its tributaries power much of the country's electricity grid and provide surplus energy sold to India. The hydropower plants — some of the largest infrastructure investments in Nepal's modern history — were built inside mountains, tunnelled deep into rock specifically because the tunnels are designed to withstand floods. They withstood the flood. But the entrances to the tunnels were buried. The plants themselves were removed from the surface.
933 workers are missing across 11 major hydropower projects. Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority confirmed this figure on August 31. At the Trishuli 3A plant alone, rescuers believe as many as 100 workers may be alive inside the turbine room — the deepest part of the facility, the farthest from the entrance, built to be the most structurally robust section. Dix and his team located the buried entrance after days of effort. They drilled a hole large enough to rappel into the tunnel. They called out. They received no response. It is not known whether the turbine room is intact, partially flooded or entirely submerged. They might have to dig 10 metres to reach the workers. They might have to dig 100 metres. They do not know.
The workers inside those tunnels came from Nepal's rural districts — from the same villages that send men to the Gulf states, to construction sites in India and to mountain projects across the Hindu Kush Himalaya. 279 workers have been rescued or managed to walk out on their own. The rest are still missing. One survivor described his team, the money they sent home, the weeks away from family. His brother-in-law worked on the same team. His sister, who is pregnant, is waiting.
This is the story the glacier collapse produced that did not fit inside the first few days of coverage. The 1,300 missing became the headline. The 933 workers in hydropower tunnels buried by mud are the specific human consequence of building energy infrastructure in a climate system that is accelerating beyond the design parameters of the infrastructure built inside it. Nepal's hydropower industry was built to generate electricity and development. The glacier collapse buried the plants that generated both. Rescuers are drilling into mountains on the Nepal-Tibet border to find workers they cannot see, in tunnels whose entrances the flood removed from the surface. They are calling out into the dark. They have not heard back.
