标签： Asia

A devastating natural disaster that swept through the Nepal-Tibet border region left more than 1,300 people dead, countless communities shattered, and hundreds more missing after catastrophic flash floods hit the area over a week ago. In the midst of widespread grief and despair that has engulfed the affected region, a stunning and rare moment of good news has emerged: two survivors trapped in a tunnel have been pulled out alive more than seven days after the floodwaters rushed through the area.

This unexpected successful rescue operation has sparked a renewed wave of optimism among search and rescue teams, who have been working around the clock in difficult, debris-strewn conditions to locate additional flood survivors still unaccounted for. The disaster, which unfolded rapidly when sudden, heavy rainfall triggered raging flash floods and landslides along the shared border, left local authorities scrambling to coordinate large-scale relief efforts amid damaged infrastructure and cut-off access to remote areas.

Rescue workers had faced enormous challenges in reaching trapped populations, with washed-out roads and continuing unstable terrain slowing their progress for days. When teams managed to extract the two survivors from the tunnel, where they had survived for more than a week without formal outside assistance, the breakthrough gave rescuers new motivation to continue their search, with many now holding out hope that more people can be found alive against all odds. The international community has already offered support to Nepal’s government in its relief and recovery efforts, as the country begins to count the enormous human and economic cost of one of the deadliest natural disasters it has faced in recent years.

Nine days after catastrophic glacial-triggered flash floods swept through a Himalayan valley straddling the Nepal-China Tibet border, Nepalese rescue teams are continuing frantic operations to locate dozens of workers trapped inside hydropower construction tunnels, with renewed optimism sparked by two successful live extractions on Friday.

The disaster, which unfolded on August 26, is one of the deadliest mountain hazard events in the region in recent decades. Preliminary investigations point to a sudden glacial collapse as the root cause, with climate scientists warning that rising global temperatures have increasingly increased glacial instability across the Himalayan region. The collapse unleashed a massive surging wall of water and debris that roared downstream, flattening entire villages, destroying critical infrastructure, and sweeping away roads, bridges, and heavy construction equipment. As of the latest update, the combined confirmed death toll across Nepal and Tibet stands at 1,311, with another 5,330 people still listed as missing. Hundreds of these missing individuals are foreign citizens hailing from at least 34 different nations.

On Friday, rescuers working at the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, one of seven active tunnel sites where more than 150 people are feared trapped, detected faint sounds from deep inside the blocked tunnel. After calling out to potential survivors, crews received a quiet response of “okay,” prompting an urgent extraction effort. Two workers, Sanjaya Shah and Kabir Maharjan, were pulled from the tunnel alive, though both sustained hand and leg injuries consistent with crawling through debris-choked passageways. The two men were immediately airlifted to Kathmandu’s Army Hospital for urgent care: Maharjan remains in critical condition, while Shah is undergoing ongoing medical assessment. Hours after the successful rescue, teams recovered the body of a third victim from the same tunnel, which was too swollen to be immediately identified. Officials estimate that another 39 people may still be trapped in the Trishuli 3A tunnel, though there is no confirmation that any additional survivors remain alive.

Across the affected region in Nepal, more than 400 Nepali citizens and 270 foreign nationals have been pulled from flood-hit areas by rescue teams, according to Colonel Jhabindra Reshmi. Progress reaching trapped tunnel workers has been severely hampered by massive accumulations of mud and rock that block existing entrances, forcing crews to dig new access holes by hand and with limited heavy equipment. Engineers have been pumping oxygen into the blocked tunnels to sustain any potential survivors, but much of the construction machinery needed to clear debris was washed away in the initial flood, slowing rescue work significantly.

Despite the immense challenges, the successful rescue of the two workers has lifted morale among response teams. Uttam Bhlon Lama, vice president of the Independent Power Producers of Nepal, told the BBC that the extraction would motivate crews to redouble their efforts. Still, major hazards remain: flood levels across the region remain high, and Nepalese authorities have issued new warnings forecasting additional rainfall that could trigger secondary flash floods.

Across the border in Tibet, the full scale of the disaster remains unclear. Chinese state media has released footage showing widespread devastation, but has released limited details on victims and local impact. As of Friday, official reports from China confirm 31 deaths and 531 people missing, and emergency response teams in Tibet have shifted their focus to assisting displaced survivors rather than continuing search operations for additional survivors.

While the exact sequence of the glacial collapse is still under scientific investigation, experts from the Asian Mountain Academic Alliance, the Stimson Centre, and China’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment note that growing glacial instability was detected in the days leading up to the event. The group has argued that more robust early warning systems could have reduced the death toll, highlighting gaps in hazard preparedness across a region increasingly vulnerable to climate change-driven glacial disasters.

Over a week has passed since catastrophic flash floods swept across the China-Nepal border, leaving a devastating trail of death and disruption that has now claimed more than 1,000 lives and left over 4,500 people unaccounted for across both nations. What stands out most in the wake of this natural disaster is the starkly contrasting approach to information transparency between the two neighboring countries, drawing new attention to long-standing patterns of information control in China around major crisis events.

On Nepal’s side of the shared border, disaster response communications have aligned with open governance norms. Nepali authorities have released frequent, granular updates on fatalities and missing persons, maintaining a public, searchable online registry that tracks survivors and those lost to the floods. Independent domestic and international journalists have been granted near-unrestricted access to hard-hit areas, with only basic accreditation requirements in place. Reporters have been allowed to visit temporary aid camps for survivors, document mass burial sites, and film rescue operations, including harrowing footage of mud-caked survivors pulled from hydropower tunnels by helicopter crews.

Grieving families have been able to share their stories publicly, conduct symbolic burial rites, and organize independent searches for missing loved ones, giving a human face to the disaster that has been largely absent from coverage on the Chinese side.

The contrast with China’s side of the border, where the disaster impacted Tibet Autonomous Region, could not be sharper. As of the most recent update released late Wednesday, Chinese authorities report 21 deaths and 541 missing people in Tibet, including 261 foreign nationals from 23 countries. Official updates are released only every few days, and access to the disaster zone has been restricted exclusively to China’s top state-run media outlets: Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television (CCTV).
Unlike Nepal’s open reporting, state media coverage has centered almost entirely on official disaster relief logistics rather than the human cost of the flood. Programming has highlighted rescue workers’ heroism, President Xi Jinping’s directives for relief efforts, and technical analysis of the glacial lake outburst that caused the floods. Names and personal stories of victims and their families have been almost entirely excluded from official coverage, and independent sources confirm that non-state journalists across China have been ordered not to conduct interviews with victim families, and to only republish official Xinhua material. The Associated Press, among other international news outlets, requested access to the affected areas shortly after the disaster struck but has yet to receive approval to enter.

This tight information control is particularly pronounced in Tibet, a region that has been marked by heavy government surveillance and restricted access for foreigners and journalists since China asserted control over the area in 1951. Even for accredited foreign journalists working elsewhere in China, travel to Tibet requires special government approval, and cross-border communications for Tibetans are heavily monitored.

Beyond restricting reporting, Chinese authorities have moved to punish social media users who have questioned the official narrative around the disaster. Tibetan cyber police have publicly announced 10 cases of people detained or fined for “spreading online rumors” related to the flood, with penalties ranging from 5 to 10 days of police detention and fines up to approximately $150. Many of these cases involved posts questioning the low official death toll, including one that noted the poster estimated at least 1,000 people had been killed, contradicting an early official count of just three dead.

This pattern of delayed and incremental updates to disaster death tolls is not unprecedented in China. In July 2024, for example, authorities waited more than a month to revise the official death toll for severe typhoon flooding in Guangxi Province, raising it from 39 initially to 159.

For families of missing Chinese victims, the lack of official transparency has forced them to turn to rare independent channels outside of Chinese government control to share their loved ones’ stories. One such outlet, the exile-based independent Chinese media Aquarian, has interviewed relatives of missing victims including Peng Guangming, a young worker on a Chinese-backed highway project on Nepal’s side of the border, who lost contact with colleagues just 10 minutes before the flood hit. Another missing person, He Hongrong, was last seen waiting to cross back into Tibet from Nepal, carrying a green backpack and en route to Lhasa. Her family has shared her photograph via the independent X account Fat Parrot, which reposts content from Chinese social media, in the hopes of finding new information about her whereabouts.

The differing approaches to disaster information between the two countries have underscored how China’s system of state-controlled media and internet regulation shapes public access to information during crises, leaving critical details about the disaster’s impact on the Chinese side still unknown more than a week after the floodwaters first surged.

Last week, catastrophic flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border left more than 1,300 people dead and devastated multiple hydropower infrastructure projects, including the Trishuli 3A Hydropower Station, where a construction tunnel was completely buried under mud, rock and flood debris. In what a senior international tunnelling expert has called a succession of overlapping miracles, two workers trapped inside the blocked tunnel were pulled alive by rescue teams in the early hours of Friday, with an intensive search now underway for dozens more still missing deep in the mountain.

Arnold Dix, president of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, who has served as a lead advisor to Nepalese hydropower authorities on the unprecedented rescue operation, shared a detailed account of the extraordinary challenges his team faced from the very start of the mission.

Unlike any rescue Dix has worked on in his decades-long career, the first major hurdle was simply locating the tunnel’s entrance. The flash flood and accompanying avalanche of debris completely rearranged the mountain landscape, moving the original entrance from its position up the hillside to a spot completely buried underground. “I’ve never known a rescue operation where you had to look for an entrance of a tunnel that was previously up the hill, that was now underground. You can imagine the enormity of the avalanche, it completely buried the entrance,” Dix explained.

To pinpoint the entrance’s approximate location, Dix and his team combined a range of tools: conventional engineering methods, decades-old topographic maps, post-disaster satellite imagery, aerial helicopter footage, and even visible surface markers like standing power poles, to triangulate the most probable position and begin digging. Against steep odds, their approach worked, and they uncovered the buried entrance – but an entirely new set of obstacles stood between rescuers and the trapped workers.

The entire tunnel passage was choked solid with mud and boulders, some as large as passenger cars. To clear the massive blockage, teams were forced to use controlled explosives – a dangerous measure never used in standard tunnel rescue scenarios, due to the extreme risk of collapsing the tunnel or harming trapped survivors. Dix praised the Nepalese army for its exceptional precision in executing the blasts, which successfully cleared debris without destabilizing the remaining tunnel structure.

Rescuers also discovered the tunnel was still filled with standing floodwater. To address this hazard, Nepalese crews used excavators and heavy pumping equipment to carve a network of drainage trenches running from the interior of the tunnel all the way out to the adjacent river, draining excess water to create safe working conditions.

In the final stage of the approach to the detected survivors, teams dug a narrow human-sized access passage through the debris along the top of the original tunnel. Dix noted this strategic choice had two key benefits: it leveraged the original tunnel’s intact roof as the roof of the new passage, cutting down on digging time and reducing collapse risk, while also mitigating the ongoing threat of secondary flooding inside the tunnel.

In the pre-dawn hours of Friday, rescuers detected faint sounds coming from deep in the passage. After calling out to confirm the presence of survivors, they received a faint reply of “okay” from two trapped men. Within minutes, workers pulled out Sanjaya Shah and Kabir Maharjan, both alive.

Despite this breakthrough, the rescue mission is far from complete. Dozens of workers are still believed to be trapped inside the tunnel, and teams have so far only cleared roughly 60 meters of debris from the entrance. Another 150 meters of digging remains before crews can reach the main hydropower station complex deep inside the mountain.

Rescuers hold cautious optimism that flood debris never reached the main station complex. If debris did penetrate the station, it would bring severe complications: any survivors there could have been injured by rock and mud flows, or the area could be fully flooded.

Dix added that rescue teams still face life-threatening risks as they push deeper into the mountain. Crews could unexpectedly encounter standing water that could trap or drown tunnellers, and the threat of a second flash flood upstream means water could surge into the tunnel from behind the rescue team, leaving crews surrounded by water on both sides.

Even so, Friday’s successful rescue has renewed the entire team’s determination and hope that more survivors can be found. The first successful extraction confirmed that the team’s untested approach to the unprecedented disaster was correct, Dix said, giving the entire operation a jolt of renewed energy. “It’s a big relief, that we are on the right track. And it gives us renewed energy that our thinking on how to conduct the rescue works… we have never done something like this before.”

Teams are now advancing toward what Dix calls the “Goldilocks zone,” the upper level of the hydropower station complex, where open dry space makes it the most likely area for survivors to have held out. Refusing to end the operation after the first successful rescue, Dix said the team is committed to pushing forward: “We got two people out. If we were playing at a casino, some might say it’s time to walk away, but we say game on, time to take on the house.”