A 30-year-old mechanical foreman who survived nine days buried in a Himalayan hydropower tunnel has finally returned to his village, while roughly 900 of his fellow power station workers remain missing.
Sanjay Sah stepped off an overnight bus Sunday and walked into a crowd of about 60 people, mostly women, waiting for him in Tilathi Koiladi, a village near Nepal's border with India. His mother dabbed a pink vermilion tika on his forehead, then broke down. She held him tightly, kissed him on the cheek, and managed one word.
"My son!" she cried.
Sah's parents, uncle, wife, and daughter washed his feet in a traditional cleansing ritual. For a man who had spent nine days drinking floodwater and seepage from mountain rock just to stay alive, the ceremony carried weight beyond custom. He had left the hospital in Kathmandu on Friday, boarded a bus that night, and arrived home two days later, free, he said, for the first time since the disaster began.
The catastrophe started on August 26, when a glacial and mountain collapse near the China-Nepal border sent walls of mud and water tearing through mountain valleys. The flooding hit at least 12 hydropower projects, trapping workers deep underground in tunnel systems that extend far beneath the Himalayas.
Sah worked as a mechanical foreman at the Upper Trishuli 3A Hydropower Station. When the flood struck, debris packed the tunnel around him. He was one of roughly 500 workers believed trapped across multiple hydropower sites, with an estimated 115 at Trishuli 3A alone, AP News reported.
Rescuers, aided by experts from India, China, and South Korea, dug through 50 to 60 meters of hard-packed debris before reaching survivors. On the tenth day, crews pulled Sah and a second worker, 45-year-old mechanical supervisor Kabir Maharjan, from the tunnel alive. They were two of only three workers rescued from debris-buried tunnels across the entire disaster zone.
The broader toll is staggering. At least 1,386 people have died across Nepal. More than 5,130 remain missing. Over 800 foreigners from at least 34 countries are among the unaccounted, including dozens of Americans. Nepal observed a national day of mourning. The estimated infrastructure damage stands at roughly $2.5 billion.
After his rescue, Sah spent about a week recovering in a Kathmandu hospital. But the walls closed in on him there, too. Reuters reported that Sah described the hospital stay in terms that echoed the tunnel itself.
"I was trapped in the tunnel... I felt trapped in the hospital room too. I finally feel free here in my village."
That sense of freedom came with a heavy reminder. While Sah was hospitalized, family members phoned him about a relative still missing. The disaster did not spare Tilathi Koiladi. Rescue teams continued finding survivors as late as 12 days after the floods, but hundreds of power station workers, roughly 900, have not been found.
Sah acknowledged that reality plainly.
"There are more people from my village still missing after the flood."
The rescue of Sah and Maharjan was treated as something close to a miracle in a country reeling from loss. Nepal's Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha put it simply: "As long as there is breath, there is hope!" Australian rescue expert Arnold Dix, who assisted in the operation, described the moment rescuers believed they heard a faint response from inside the tunnel, a single word, "hunchha," meaning "yes" or "OK," Breitbart reported.
Amir Maharjan, brother of the other rescued worker, captured what the families went through. "I can't explain what we are feeling at the moment. We are just grateful to god," he said. Nepal's Communication Minister Bikram Timilsina said the government was focused on further rescues: "We are waiting for the rescue of more and more people."
But for the families of the missing, including American families desperate for answers, hope is running thin. The scale of the disaster, spread across remote mountain terrain and buried infrastructure, has overwhelmed Nepal's capacity.
Standing in his village Sunday, surrounded by the people he thought he might never see again, Sah did not talk about quitting. He did not rage at his employer or demand answers from the government. He said he wanted time with his family and his neighbors, and then he said something that tells you everything about the kind of man who survives nine days underground.
"I will stay in my village for some time now. I want to meet all my people. But if I am called back to duty, I will go."
That willingness to return, to the same tunnels, the same mountains, the same risk, is not recklessness. It is the posture of a working man who understands that the infrastructure his country needs does not build itself, and that someone has to go back into the ground to do it.
Nine hundred of his colleagues are still down there. The least their country owes them is an honest accounting of what went wrong, and a serious answer for the families still waiting.
