Kathmandu: An Australian tunnelling expert who helped to orchestrate the extraordinary rescue of two workers from a hydropower tunnel in northern Nepal is headed for the disaster zone, firmly believing there is still hope of finding more survivors trapped hundreds of metres below the earth.
After helping to lead the rescue operation remotely from his home in Victoria this week, engineer and geologist Arnold Dix flew into Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, late on Friday night (Nepal time).
While the odds are against he and the rest of the global team of experts providing advice to Nepalese authorities on the ongoing rescue mission, he said that he absolutely believed there was hope of finding more survivors under the earth some 10 days after the devastating floods.
“In the game of paper, scissor, rock, human, the odds aren’t good. But yeah [there are] survivable pockets, absolutely, and that’s what we’re aiming for,” he said.
On Saturday morning, he boarded a helicopter for the Chilime Hydropower Plant, high in the Himalayan valley and close to the Chinese border.
There he will meet with members of the Indian rescue team he worked with after 41 men were trapped in the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel in the Himalayas in 2023. Dix has also worked on other rescue missions, including at Ground Zero after September 11.
“We’re just like the underground rescue buddies,” he told this masthead just ahead of his flight on Saturday.
It has been more than a week since devastating floods tore through Nepal, causing tsunami-like waves of water, rock and debris that has resulted in 1294 confirmed deaths. More than 5000 people are still missing, including 583 foreign nationals. The Chinese government has reported 31 confirmed deaths and 531 missing – including 261 foreign nationals – on the Tibet side of the border.
Among those still unaccounted for are workers believed to be trapped inside the hydropower tunnels that Nepal has used to harness the fast-flowing waters of the Himalayas and increase the blackout-prone country’s power generation.
Nepal’s Independent Power Producers’ Association said during the week that it believed at least eight people could be trapped in the Chilime tunnel. It is one of seven hydropower tunnels at which rescue operations are taking place, with hundreds of workers believed to have been trapped.
Until Friday, Dix had helped the effort remotely from Australia, unable to board a plane during the crucial hours and days after the disaster.
“Time was of the essence,” he said. “I couldn’t lose two days because I knew they had to start digging.”
They had focused on the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, and he said the rescue of mechanical foreman Sanjay Sah and mechanical supervisor Kabir Maharjan from the tunnel on Friday was confirmation of the work he and others had been doing throughout the week.
“[It means] we’ve got survivable zones in there,” Dix said. “That confirms our theory, if you like. Until that, it was a theory. We really didn’t know if it was survivable in there.”
It makes him believe there could “absolutely” be more workers still alive inside.
“Of course, the odds are against us. Like, you wouldn’t, you know, go to the casino and play the house on these things normally,” he said.
Dix and his team had relied on engineering drawings of the massive hydropower structures that Nepal uses to generate electricity, as well as satellite imagery, to identify the survivable pockets inside.
“The world has never had something like this,” he said.
“We’re not dealing with tunnels that might’ve collapsed. They won’t have. We’re dealing with tunnels that are filled up with stuff.
“It’s this explosive inrush. It just turns the textbook on its head … that’s why the rescue yesterday was so important because we’ve never dealt with anything like this.”
While they were confident in their theory, the challenge of digging into the deep, unstable earth, where “rocks the size of cars” had barrelled into the tunnels, presented many challenges of its own.
“That’s on the one hand, and the other hand, [the question was] how the hell are we going to get in there to get them?” he said.
“You have to find a reason to use your resources, which is where might people be alive? That’s the first question, and then your second question is, ‘OK, now, how do we get them?’
“You can’t just dig everywhere. You’ve seen the destruction here, so you’ve got to be very specific in what you do.”
In the end, though, relying on the information they had, Dix and other global experts had to make a decision.
“You can do some fancy calculations about whether they could survive or not, or you go: ‘Well, look, what are we going to do? Stick round and have a bloody conference about it, or do we dig?’ And so you dig,” he said.
Read more reporting from Nepal by South-East Asia correspondent Zach Hope and chief photojournalist Kate Geraghty:
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