Two pulled alive from a Nepal flood tunnel on September 4, 2026 — voices were heard inside

On September 4 local time, two Nepali workers were pulled alive from a tunnel at the Trishuli 3A hydropower plant in Bagmati province, north-central Nepal. Nine days after the flood of August 26.

They are Sanjay Sahi, a mechanical foreman, and Kabir Maharjan, a mechanical supervisor.

One sentence from the rescue is the substance of the day's news.

1. "Voices carried inside the tunnel"

One of the two men told rescuers that he had communicated by voice with other workers inside the tunnel.

That means two things.

First, more people may still be alive underground. A rescue on day nine is remarkable on its own, but if voices were exchanged, other people were in that space.

Second, connected air space exists. A hydropower headrace tunnel is an underground channel that carries river water to the turbines. Its height varies along its length and it rises in sections, so when a flood surges in, higher stretches can hold air the water never reaches. The place the two men came from was probably one of those.

Time works against this. Water, body heat and air reach their limits in that order. No additional survivors have been confirmed.

2. The nine Koreans are six kilometres upstream

The nine missing South Korean workers were at the Upper Trishuli-1 (UT-1) hydropower plant.

Trishuli 3A, where the survivors emerged, is roughly six kilometres downstream on the same Trishuli river. Same river, same flood, comparable facility. People were alive there after nine days — that is what September 4 established.

The search itself found nothing. Korea's joint rapid response team conducted a combined search with the Nepali army and reported no new findings.

Current deployment:

The search is focused on routes the missing might have taken if they moved or evacuated, covering both the possibility that they are trapped inside and that they got out and became stranded (see "What Korea's overseas emergency relief team is").

3. The missing count keeps rising

The overall toll: 1,130 dead, 4,462 missing — a combined Nepal and Tibet figure, with 16 of the deaths in Tibet.

Laid out over ten days, one line stands out.

Deaths have slowed in recent days while the missing rose sharply — from 3,048 on August 30 to 4,462 on September 4, an increase of more than 1,400.

That is not new damage. It is reports from areas unreachable in the first days still entering the tally. And while that count keeps climbing, the eventual death toll may be far above the current figure.

Five Australians were confirmed alive the same day.

4. What is still open

• No additional survivors have been confirmed. The account of voices inside the tunnel comes from one rescued worker; whether those people are still alive is unknown.
• Check the basis of the tally. The 1,130 and 4,462 figures were reported as combined Nepal and Tibet counts. We did not separately verify the country-level numbers.
• No official explanation for the jump in the missing. Late reporting from cut-off areas is the presumption, not a statement from authorities.
• Tunnel geometry differs by plant. There is no basis yet for assuming the conditions that made survival possible at Trishuli 3A apply at UT-1. How similar the two tunnels are in cross-section and gradient has not been established.
• The cause was a glacial lake outburst, which began in the Himalayan border region on August 26 and left three landslide-dammed lakes behind, sustaining a secondary flood risk (see "What a glacial lake outburst flood is").