Nepal Army blasts into Trishuli tunnel as 639 hydropower workers remain missing

KATHMANDU, NEPAL — Rescuers are blasting and excavating flood-buried hydropower sites as Nepal reconciles sharply changing lists of missing workers.

Nepalese Army engineers used a controlled blast at the Trishuli-3A hydropower site early Monday and deployed excavators to dig through roughly 10 metres of debris as rescue teams tried to reopen access to an underground powerhouse. Army updates reported by Onlinekhabar said crews were still clearing water, mud and sediment, while parallel searches continued at Trishuli-3B, Chilime, Upper Trishuli-1 and Langtang.

The latest nationwide count attributed to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority puts the death toll at 939 and the number of people still unaccounted for at 3,925 as of 18:00 Monday. The breakdown includes 639 people associated with hydropower projects and 592 foreign nationals. Chinese authorities had reported 16 deaths and 546 missing in Tibet, taking the reported Nepal-China totals to 955 dead and 4,471 missing.

That 639 figure should not be read as a confirmed count of people trapped underground. It is a category of hydropower-project personnel who remain out of contact. Site-level reporting shows why the distinction matters: at Upper Trishuli-3B, the project company said everyone known to have been inside its tunnel escaped safely even though 198 employees, contractors, relatives and others associated with the wider project site remained unaccounted for.

Rescuers have reached some tunnels while others remain blocked

At Chilime, a joint team including foreign specialists advanced about 100 metres into a tunnel and recovered two bodies, according to Nepal Army information reported by Onlinekhabar. At Upper Trishuli-1, rescuers reached about 300 metres inside and recovered one body. Search teams also began work at Langtang with searchlights while technical crews continued operations at other damaged projects.

The Rasuwagadhi search produced another warning against assuming that a missing worker must still be underground. The Army, project engineers and a drone team reached the far end of that project’s tunnel and found no one, but three workers reportedly on duty there when the flood struck remained missing afterward. Their whereabouts had not been established.

At Trishuli-3A, rescuers had previously drilled five openings to send air toward the underground section before turning to excavation and controlled blasting. Nepal Electricity Authority officials estimated that roughly 40 to 42 technical personnel had been working on an overhaul of the underground powerhouse when the flood hit.

The Trishuli corridor contains a dense hydropower workforce

Primary project records help explain why the river corridor held so many workers. The International Finance Corporation describes Upper Trishuli-1 as a 216-megawatt run-of-river project in Rasuwa, about 70 kilometres northeast of Kathmandu. An IFC investment disclosure projected construction-phase employment of about 1,100 workers for that project alone.

The IFC’s environmental review also documented six operating hydropower projects and 18 projects with construction licences in the Trishuli basin at the time of its assessment. Those older records do not establish the cause of the August flood or responsibility for the losses, but they show the scale of hydropower development and workforce concentration along the river system before the current emergency.

Official lists are still being reconciled

Nepal’s disaster authority is maintaining a person-level SETU registry for the Rasuwa flood. The searchable government database records people as missing, rescued, found safe, injured or dead, including entries associated with hydropower locations and Trishuli-3A.

The hydropower count itself fell from an earlier 933 to 639 in the Monday evening reporting. That is a reduction of 294 people, or about 31.5%, calculated from the published figures. The fall does not mean 294 people were necessarily pulled alive from tunnels: reconciliation can also reflect workers making contact, corrected attendance records and duplicate missing-person reports.

The unresolved figure is therefore narrower and more important: how many people are actually inside blocked underground spaces, and at which projects. Current evidence supports hundreds of missing hydropower personnel, but the material reviewed for this draft does not establish one synchronized official tunnel-by-tunnel count.

Rescue crews are continuing excavation, pumping, drilling and controlled blasting, with foreign technical teams assisting at several sites. The next verifiable milestone will be confirmation that additional tunnel sections have been opened and that authorities can match the people believed to have been underground with the national missing-person registry.