He Fought Through Darkness, Bodies and Rising Water. When He Saw Daylight, It Felt Unreal.
Dhan Bahadur Tamang was already underground when the air changed.
The 32-year-old support worker and driver was inside a tunnel at the Upper Trishuli 1 hydropower project, near Nepal’s border with China, when pressure shifted and dust lifted under the industrial lights. “Something was coming,” he later recalled. What arrived was a surge that had already flattened settlements upstream on the Trishuli River and torn through valleys after an ice-and-rock collapse high in the Himalayas on August 26, 2026.
Nepal’s official death count from the disaster has climbed past 1,250. Thousands more remain missing across the affected districts and on the Tibetan side of the border. Along the river corridor, several hydropower sites were buried in mud, ice and debris. Hundreds of workers were reported on site when the water hit. Tamang said he had no time to understand it. People ran and shouted. Before he could react, he was on top of a tanker truck. The vehicle began to move as water rushed into his section of the tunnel.
He felt, again and again, that he was going to die.
He clung to pipes and whatever metal he could find, trying to keep his head above the current. One of his legs was injured. His thoughts went to his parents and the family he feared he would never see. He shouted. He cried.
When the force of the water eased, he was still alive. So were others. They tried to return toward the entrance and found the way blocked by wreckage. The only path left was deeper into the system. As they moved, they began to see the dead. Some people were injured and could not walk. Others had been crushed so completely that nothing could be done for them.
The tunnel fell into near-total darkness. Tamang and the others held hands so they would not lose one another, picking their way through water, broken equipment and bodies with a single flashlight. He later described it as a long, exhausting fight through darkness, water, wreckage and the remains of men who had been working beside him hours earlier.
Then came a burst of light. The brightness outside felt unreal.
Villagers gave the shaking group dry clothes. Helicopter flights were delayed by fog, slowing formal rescue. Tamang made his way home with local help, then to a hotel and a hospital. When he finally saw his wife, she wept. Since returning to Tarkeshwar in Bagmati Province, he has had nightmares of the tunnel and of colleagues who did not walk out.
A small number of workers escaped other tunnels in the first hours. Days later, search teams still faced blocked shafts packed with sludge. On September 4, two men were pulled alive from a different project, Upper Trishuli 3A, after nine days underground, a rare moment of hope while hundreds of hydropower workers remained unaccounted for.
Tamang’s decision is simpler. He will not work inside hydropower tunnels again. He does not want to test fate.
The Himalayan rivers that power Nepal’s electricity also carry glacial risk. When ice, rock and water drop together into a narrow valley, a construction tunnel becomes a trap. Tamang survived by climbing, holding on, and walking toward a light he was not sure he would reach. Many who shared that darkness did not.
