Nine days after a catastrophic glacial collapse sent a wall of ice, rock, and mud roaring down Nepal’s Trishuli River valley, rescuers achieved the improbable. On the morning of September 4, 2026, two mud-caked workers were pulled alive from a debris-choked tunnel at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project in Rasuwa district.
Sanjay Sah, a 30-year-old mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, a 45-year-old mechanical supervisor, had been trapped roughly 170 meters underground since the disaster struck on August 26. Videos released by the Nepali Army show the dramatic moment: one man hoisted from a narrow opening as bystanders cheered, the other carried out on a rescuer’s back, both faces and clothes thick with sludge. They were quickly airlifted to an army hospital in Kathmandu.
Sah was in stable condition. Maharjan was critically ill, initially unable to move his limbs and showing signs of severe disorientation and jaundice. A third body was also recovered from the site.
Survival in the Dark
Sah later described how he had been in the control room when word of the approaching flood arrived. Instead of fleeing, he stayed to urge colleagues to escape, losing precious time in the process. “My responsibility was to save everyone’s lives,” he said. “It was not right for me to run away.”
Once trapped, he kept himself going by chanting Hindu mantras in the darkness. He reported hearing and communicating with three or four other people nearby and believed more might still be alive deeper in the tunnel or powerhouse. When rescuers finally reached him, one of his first questions was simply: “What day is it?”
A Buried Landscape
The scale of the destruction made the rescue extraordinary. The flood, triggered by a glacier collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border, buried the hydropower complex so thoroughly that engineers needed satellite images to locate the tunnels. It took nearly a week of round-the-clock digging, heavy machinery, and international technical support before teams could force a path through the sludge.
On Friday morning, rescuers heard faint voices answering their calls. Crawling through narrow, mud-filled passages, they reached the two survivors. The breakthrough offered a rare moment of hope in a disaster that has killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal and Tibet and left thousands still missing, including hundreds of hydropower workers believed trapped in tunnels across multiple projects
The recovery of Sah and Maharjan stands as one of the most remarkable rescues of the crisis — a testament to both human endurance and the determination of the teams who refused to give up the search.
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