Nine Days in the Tunnel, Then One Word: "Okay"

After the 26 August flood in Nepal, rescue crews from six countries kept clearing a blocked hydropower tunnel long after the numbers said to stop. On day nine, something answered back.

On 26 August the Trishuli valley in northern Nepal filled with water and rock in a matter of minutes. Investigators believe a glacier partly collapsed high above the river. What came down erased road, villages and worksites. More than 1,300 people were killed in Nepal and 31 across the border in Tibet. Nearly 5,600 are still listed as missing.

One of the places hit was Trishuli 3A, a hydropower project in Rasuwa district with hundreds of men working inside and around it. Five hundred and fifty-seven of them did not come out. Roughly 115 were thought to be somewhere in the main tunnel — a bore driven into the mountain, now packed with mud, water and debris.

Work in a place like that is slow. Teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States took shifts alongside Nepal's army. Australia sent fifteen drone specialists. Every metre had to be cleared by hand and machine, and every day the odds got worse.

On the ninth day, 4 September, someone heard voices. Then that morning a rescuer called into the tunnel and got an answer back. One word. "Okay."

Two men came out. Sanjay Shah, 30, a mechanical foreman. Kabir Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor. Medics reached them, a helicopter carried them to Kathmandu, and one of them told the army what nobody at the site had said out loud in a week: there are others alive in there.

"We are waiting for the rescue of more and more people," communication minister Bikram Timilsina said.

They did not wait long. The next day a Nepali army team working with South Korean disaster experts reached a man named Lu Haitao. He is 49, from Henan province in China, a farmer and carpenter who took his first job abroad in February and travelled out with a man from his own village. When the flood came he climbed to the highest point of the tunnel he could reach and stayed there.

He had seen lights before. Several times over those ten days he watched them move somewhere far off and shouted, and nothing came of it, and eventually he stopped shouting. "I had lost hope," he said. When the beams finally landed on his face he did not believe them. "When they shone before my eyes, I couldn't believe it."

He was carried out and flown to hospital in stable condition.

His family in Henan had spent those ten days refreshing news pages. His cousin Lu Haiqing ran Nepali reports through translation software every morning, read about recovered bodies, and came back the next morning to read again. "This day has finally come," he said. "There is hope when one doesn't give up." Lu's sister, Lu Hairong, heard by phone before the news broke, and called it a stroke of luck inside the misfortune.

That same day, in the town of Nuwakot, rescuers pulled a woman alive from the rubble of a building, ten days after the water hit. She was covered in mud. They flew her to Kathmandu too.

None of this undoes 26 August. Thousands of families in Nepal are still waiting for a name to turn up on a list, and most of those lists will end badly. The men still inside the Trishuli tunnel are not out.

But there is something in how these three came back. Nobody was owed a rescue on day nine, or day ten. The searching was a choice, remade every morning by people from six countries who had never heard of Sanjay Shah or Kabir Maharjan or Lu Haitao, and who kept clearing mud anyway — long after the numbers said to stop.

That is what it took for a man in the dark to hear boots instead of water. And for one word, "Okay", to be the best news Nepal had all week.

GoodPeopleMap collects people like those rescue crews. Most of them never make the news at all.

Sources: Al Jazeera · NBC News · CBS News