Inside the WhatsApp group guiding Nepal’s tunnel rescuers after a deadly flash flood
KATHMANDU, Sept. 4 (Reuters) - When a surge of water, mud and rock tore through Nepal’s Trishuli Valley on Aug. 26, it buried the entrances to Himalayan hydropower tunnels, shut down roads and turned a tightly planned industrial river corridor into a sprawling search zone.
Officials say the deluge came from a glacier collapse. More than 1,200 people were killed, and more than 4,000 are still missing. About 900 people were reported missing from six hydropower plants in the valley — at least three of them under construction — and the authorities hope some may have survived by retreating deeper into tunnel systems as the flood arrived.
Since then, some of the most important command work has happened not at a rescue headquarters but inside a chat thread on WhatsApp. The group was set up by engineers before the disaster for site coordination. In the days after Aug. 26, it was expanded to include more experts, and it has become a remote resource for teams trying to decide where to cut through rock, mud and twisted steel.
On Saturday, as rescue crews searched the buried remains of the Chilime hydropower plant near the Chinese border, a government official posted a request in the group: “Can you send me Chilime layout drawings?” Within minutes, a member who had joined in support of the rescue sent the project’s powerhouse drawings and details of its access tunnels. Reuters saw the exchange and other messages in the group, which now has more than 500 members.
The difficulty is hard to overstate. The flood dumped an estimated 2.2 million metric tons of mud, rock and debris across the valley, and the torrent reshaped the ground around structures designed to carry water and to serve as underground passages.
Nepal army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet described the task this way: “The flood has altered the terrain around the tunnels and changed their structure, while mud, rocks, soil and other debris had accumulated inside. This is not a normal closure of tunnels.”
At Chilime, photographs taken by Reuters on Monday showed a large tunnel entrance with debris pushed almost to the ceiling just a short distance inside. Similar blockages were found at Rasuwagadhi, farther south, where crews got roughly 250 meters into one tunnel before it stopped them.
Authorities have not given up. Nepal Electricity Authority board member Amshu Kiran Shahi said rescuers at Rasuwagadhi were preparing to go back into the same tunnel. He said as many as 46 people may be inside a chamber, possibly with access to food and water. “We are trying to reach there inside again to look for people,” he said.
A Nepal Electricity Authority manager, speaking on condition of anonymity, said rescue workers had also contacted former plant employees through the WhatsApp group for advice on the tunnel networks. The drawings posted in the chat, he said, were proving useful.
In one project, that kind of planning appears to have helped. At Upper Trishuli 3A, rescuers took almost six days to expose a buried tunnel entrance before they could enter. They also pushed oxygen through pipes into possible cavities, on the assumption that survivors might be trapped in air pockets. On Friday, a lawmaker said two people had been brought out alive from the tunnel — nine days after the disaster.
A Reuters photographer who flew to Upper Trishuli 3A on Thursday saw excavators at the mouth of a tunnel, trying to move boulders and work their way deeper inside.
The affected installations are part of Nepal’s expanding hydroelectric network, which powers towns and cities and exports surplus electricity to India. The late-August flood knocked out 10% of the country’s generation capacity in a single event, an abrupt reminder that a source of growth can carry hidden vulnerabilities in a crowded Himalayan valley.
The flood caught many workers without warning. Jan Jiwan Thakur, a civil engineer at Upper Trishuli 1, said a colleague warned him moments before the water arrived. He ran toward the hillside with about 100 other employees. “We just ran away toward the hillside and, after two to three minutes when we looked down, everything was gone,” he said. “The flood debris had entirely covered our office area.”
Dhan Bahadur Tamang described escaping through a tunnel at the same plant as loose pipes and equipment rushed around him. Knowing the tunnel system, he and several others found a way out. During that underground journey, he said, he saw bodies.
In the WhatsApp group, members have been posting the names and cellphone numbers of missing workers, helping government officials relay them to telecom authorities in the hope of finding where people were last seen.
For relatives, the waiting remains the hardest part. Rajesh Shrestha, who runs a workshop making window grills, said he still expects to see his 30-year-old son Rajish, an environmental engineer at Upper Trishuli 1, come home carrying his bag, as he did after every shift. “Whenever I look outside, I imagine seeing him carrying a bag and coming home, just as he used to,” Shrestha said. “I am surviving on the hope that he will return.”
The rescue effort has not been declared over. With unstable debris, damaged access roads and tunnels that were not designed for this kind of operation, every site has become a test of improvisation. The WhatsApp group has become part of that answer — a rapidly assembled link between the engineers who built these projects and the rescuers still trying to get inside them.