Nepal Flood Response Fuels Regret Over Delayed Coordination With Experts

By the 12th day of Nepal’s devastating floods, rescue teams were still working through at least six hydropower tunnels, exposing the consequences of delayed coordination, inadequate equipment and weak safety design.

About 900 workers were reported missing from 12 damaged hydropower plants, and roughly 500 were believed to be trapped inside tunnels. Nepal’s army and police struggled with limited knowledge of underground power stations and tunnel layouts. Mi-17 helicopters assigned to move heavy equipment could carry only about three tonnes, forcing rescuers to dismantle machinery before transporting and reassembling it on site.

Kulman Ghising, a former chief of the Nepal Electricity Authority, said the response would have moved faster if engineers and specialists had been brought together on the first day to identify access points and coordinate equipment. International rescue teams also arrived late. While authorities struggled to obtain tunnel information and machinery, an informal WhatsApp group involving more than 500 engineers and government officials helped fill the gap by sharing plant designs, tunnel entrances and information about missing workers in real time.

“

If project engineers and experts had been brought together on the first day to identify entry points into the structures and coordinate equipment, the response would have been faster.

That effort helped rescue two workers trapped in an air pocket at the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project after 10 days. The following day, Korean and Nepali rescuers freed a Chinese worker from Upper Trishuli-1, where 200 to 300 workers had taken shelter in auxiliary tunnels. But sand had filled about four kilometers of the project’s nine-kilometer tunnel network, delaying the entry of Korean and Chinese rescue teams.

The disaster has intensified demands for prevention and stronger safety standards. Ghising proposed emergency stairways linking long tunnels to areas 300 to 400 meters above underground powerhouses, with tunnel entrances placed 150 to 200 meters up mountain slopes rather than at river level. He also called for remote operation from urban control centers, real-time glacial-lake monitoring, information sharing with China and early-warning sirens downstream. Others questioned whether hydropower development has expanded too rapidly across the Himalayas. On a national day of mourning, Nepal lowered flags as authorities reported 1,398 deaths and 5,515 missing people on the Nepal and Chinese Tibet sides as of the seventh day.

“

We need safer reconstruction in safer places.