Nepal’s day of national mourning has not slowed the most consequential operational problem left by the August 26 floods: gaining access to damaged hydropower sites where hundreds of workers remain missing.
More than 1,300 people have died across Nepal and Tibet, while about 5,000 remain missing. At 12 hydropower projects in Nepal, around 900 workers are unaccounted for and roughly 500 are believed to have been in tunnels. Those estimates have turned underground access into a central question for both the rescue operation and the future of Nepal’s energy infrastructure.
The 12 projects have a combined capacity of about 670 megawatts, according to industry representatives cited by Associated Press. Four were under construction, seven operational and one in testing. That mix matters. The flood did not hit a single plant or a single stage of development; it struck an entire cluster of assets, workers, construction roads, portals and power infrastructure in the same mountain corridor.
The immediate challenge is physical. Mud, boulders and debris blocked tunnels and buried entrances. Roads and bridges that would normally carry excavators, pumps and rescue equipment were damaged by the same event. In remote valleys, losing one access route can turn a technically manageable operation into a logistical bottleneck.
There have been notable rescues. Two Nepali workers were brought out alive from the Trishuli 3A tunnel nine days after the flood. A Chinese worker was rescued from another hydropower tunnel the next day. Teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States are assisting Nepal, adding specialised expertise to a response that is operating across unstable and heavily damaged terrain.
The flooding was likely triggered by a glacier collapse, although the precise causal chain remains under investigation. That uncertainty does not reduce the strategic lesson. Hydropower in mountain regions depends on networks — roads, transmission, tunnels, communications, construction camps and emergency services. When a high-impact flood strikes, those networks can fail together.
Nepal’s Foreign Ministry says the Bhote Koshi River floods caused extensive damage to houses, buildings, roads, bridges, hydropower facilities and other critical infrastructure in Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and other districts. Thousands of displaced people have also been living in relief centres. The response therefore competes for the same transport capacity and heavy equipment needed for both humanitarian relief and industrial rescue.
The political pressure is rising. Families of missing hydropower workers protested near the prime minister’s office and ministries in Kathmandu, demanding faster searches and better information. Their frustration highlights a governance problem familiar in large infrastructure disasters: companies, ministries, emergency services and local authorities may all hold different parts of the information needed to locate workers and reach them.
Once the search phase ends, Nepal will face a second set of decisions. Damaged plants must be inspected, power capacity assessed and access roads rebuilt. Project owners and regulators will also need to examine whether emergency planning assumed that a tunnel could be reached after a regional infrastructure collapse.
For now, rescue remains the priority. But the flood has already shown that the cost of infrastructure failure is not measured only in lost megawatts. It is measured in whether a system can still reach the people working inside it when the road, tunnel entrance and communications network all fail at once.