More than a thousand dead nearly 4000 still missing and hundreds trapped underground in mud filled tunnels Nepal’s worst Himalayan flood in years is turning into a desperate race against time.

Nepal’s disaster agency says the death toll from the devastating floods on the border with Tibet has crossed 1000 with more than 3900 people still missing. Of those over 600 are workers believed to be trapped inside a vast network of tunnels at hydropower sites along the Trishuli River.

Engineers have been pumping air into the tunnels to keep any survivors alive. One team did manage to get into a tunnel leading to a plant earlier on Monday but had to withdraw after finding no one inside.

The longer it takes the more our hope dies This operation must move much faster because every second is meaningful to us Jiban Khadka whose relative is also trapped told Kantipur. It is a frustratingly slow operation he added.

Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah said 279 people had been rescued from the sites on Monday and that operations had been intensified describing the floods as not an ordinary event.

This incident indicates that the risks we face in the Himalayan region are increasing alongside climate change It is now time for us to strongly raise with the international community the issue of the disasters we are experiencing as a result of climate change Shah wrote in a Facebook post late on Monday.

The rescue itself is extraordinary. An international team led by Chinese and Nepalese military personnel is spearheading efforts with experts from India Korea and Australia also involved. Nepal relies on the army to blast boulders bigger than houses to even find the tunnel mouths.

The actual signature of them has gone everything is just missing It looks like a lunar landscape Australian engineer Arnold Dix who is helping remotely and is the former head of the International Tunnelling Association told BBC Radio 4. There are boulders bigger than houses I have never seen that before in my life.

He said once they locate the power stations they have to decide whether to dig or blast but the underground environment might still have protected some workers from the deluge above.

Nepal gets about 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower with around 4300 megawatts of generation capacity. It has spent the last decade building plants along its mountainous river systems like the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi which tap glacial melt and monsoon rains.

That is a huge strength and a huge vulnerability. The World Bank warned in its Climate Risk Profile that this near total reliance is a potential vulnerability to glacial melting landslides and Glacial Lake Outburst Floods known as GLOFs.

We have seen it before. In the past 40 years there have been 26 GLOFs on Nepal’s rivers. In October 2023 a GLOF in Sikkim destroyed the 1200 megawatt Teesta Three dam. In July 2025 a GLOF on the Bhotekoshi wiped out four hydropower schemes at once.

This latest disaster triggered by a glacial collapse high in the Himalayas that sent a wall of rock ice and meltwater down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys has already knocked out around 360 megawatts about 8 to 10 percent of Nepal’s entire grid with at least 11 projects either completed or under construction damaged.

As one relative Priya Kharel whose brother Milan was working in Upper Trishuli One told News Nepali Those who returned from the hydropower site said there were people inside the tunnel So there is hope that if the army reaches them quickly they can be saved.

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