The rescuers heard voices. They crawled through a sludge-filled tunnel deep underground where employees of a hydroelectric plant in Nepal had been trapped for nine days.
“We are coming!” Lt. Col. Ganga Baral, one of the leaders of the operation, said he had called out. “Don’t worry, the Nepali Army is coming.”
On Friday morning, two mud-caked survivors were rescued from the tunnels and hoisted into the open air, an extraordinary moment captured on video and in photos by the army.
The improbable rescue provided a measure of hope a week and a half after a glacial collapse unleashed a tsunami of mud and boulders that killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal and Tibet and left thousands of others missing.
The men were rescued from a hydroelectric center buried so deeply in the detritus of the flood that engineers had to use satellite images to pinpoint its location amid the disfigured landscape.
Hirashova Maharjan, the wife of Kabir Maharjan, one of the workers rescued, described her husband as deeply disoriented after being airlifted to Kathmandu, the capital, for medical treatment.
“He didn’t even recognize me,” she said from the army hospital in Kathmandu. But his condition has since improved, she said.
“He is stable now,” she said. “We’re so happy. We are crying with happiness. Thank you to the army and to the government.”
The raging floodwaters that erupted on Aug. 26 washed away roads, bridges and, in some cases, entire villages.
The two men were rescued from a tunnel in the Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project. The body of a third man, a mechanical engineer, was also recovered on Friday, according to Dirghayu Kumar Shrestha, the head of the Nepal Electricity Authority.
More than 40 other workers were thought to be inside the tunnel, according to Sanjay Sah, one of the rescued men. It was not clear how many were still alive.
Mr. Sah was able to answer questions through an oxygen mask. He spoke from a stretcher in a video that was posted to a government ministry’s Facebook page. He said he thought three or four people were still alive in the area where he had been found.
“I used to work in the control room as an operator,” he says in the video. “Usually there would be four or five people there, but at the time, there were 40 or 45.”
He added: “I tried to get everyone out and tried to warn everyone. But then I ran out of time.”
Mr. Sah, who was a mechanical foreman at the hydroelectric plant, said he had recited prayers “over and over again” during his time trapped underground in darkness. “How many days has it been?” he asked.
The rescue efforts have been grueling. Images posted by the Nepali Army showed rescuers slithering through sludge deep in the tunnels with hard hats and flashlights. Other rescuers paddled through tunnels in inflatable dinghies, the kind used in white-water rafting.
Arnold Dix, an Australian geologist and engineer who is assisting the Nepalese authorities in the rescue operations, said it had taken a day or two to locate the power stations and to develop a plan to rescue the workers.
Nepal has a large hydroelectric industry that harnesses the fast-flowing waters in the Himalayas. Many of the projects have tunnel systems deep in the earth along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers, which bore the brunt of the flooding.
Mr. Dix said he had focused on the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, relying on engineering drawings of the structures underground, satellite imagery and old charts to try and identify any potential “Goldilocks zones” — a term he used to describe a small subterranean area “where a human being could have survived.”
Most of the rescue efforts have been focused in the project’s cable tunnel, which runs from the underground powerhouse to the transmission grid.
The operation has been slow and difficult work, Mr. Dix said. Rescuers have had to dig through mud and use explosives to blast through rocks “the size of cars.” Once inside the tunnel, they were faced with water that had to be drained, he added.
Workers had to dig a huge drainage canal back to the river.
“We were worried that the tunnel was full of water, and it would drown us, or maybe drown people who were ahead of us in the tunnel,” Mr. Dix said.
Rescuers were then able to create a small gap along the top of the cable tunnel through which they could crawl, calling to any survivors. That was the area where rescuers found Mr. Maharjan and Mr. Sah.
Mr. Sah’s family had all but given up hope that he might be found alive. Dev Sah, his brother- in-law, said that the family had decided just a day earlier to provide a DNA sample in case his body needed to be identified.
On Friday, Dev Sah said he had spoken to the rescued man at the hospital and had to reassure him repeatedly that he was now safe.
“He has received a new life today,” Dev Sah said.
Alex Travelli, Binod Ghimire and Sajal Pradhan contributed reporting.
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