He Chanted Mantras in the Dark for Nine Days. Then Nepal Pulled Him Out Alive

The video is nineteen seconds long and it is already the only nineteen seconds of good news to come out of Rasuwa district in nine days. A man covered head to foot in gray mud is half-carried, half-walked out of a jagged opening in the rock by two soldiers, one under each arm, his legs barely under him. Somewhere off camera, people are cheering. He blinks like someone who has forgotten what daylight does to eyes. His name is Sanjay Sah. He is 30 years old, a mechanical foreman at the Trishuli 3A hydropower plant, and until Friday morning he was one of roughly 900 workers Nepal had not been able to account for since a wall of glacial floodwater tore through the valley on August 26.

A second man came out not long after: Kabir Maharjan, 45, a mechanical supervisor, pulled from the same buried tunnel with what officials described only as an unclear but stable condition. Both were flown by helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu. A body was also recovered nearby, the army said, a fact that sat right next to the celebration without canceling it out, the way grief and relief so often have to share the same sentence in a disaster this size.

Nine days, then a voice

Rescue teams had been working the Trishuli 3A site for more than a week with the grim, methodical patience of people who no longer expect to find anyone breathing. Then, Friday morning, they heard something. Voices, coming from somewhere inside a tunnel system that a Nepali energy adviser described to CBS News as less a simple shaft than a buried maze of rooms and chambers snaking up and down alongside the Trishuli River — built to carry water, not to be a shelter, and yet the only shelter dozens of men had when the mountain let go above them. Nepalese lawmaker Shri Ram Neupane and army spokesman Brig. Gen. Raja Ram Basnet confirmed the two rescues within minutes of each other on Friday. Basnet said one of the survivors told rescuers that more people were still alive further inside.

What makes the story almost unbearable to sit with is what Sah did before the water reached him. According to an account relayed by the Nepali army, he was in the plant's control room when he realized a dam breach was underway, and instead of running, he stayed long enough to warn dozens of colleagues to get out. "I made sure to evacuate everyone else, but I didn't get the chance to escape myself," he said afterward from his hospital bed, in a video shared by Nepali authorities. He said there had been 40 to 50 people in the tunnel area when the water hit. He does not yet know how many of them made it.

What the numbers still can't hold

Set against the scale of this disaster, two survivors can look almost too small to be the story. It isn't. Nepal's death toll from the August 26 floods — triggered by what officials believe was a partial glacier collapse above the Nepal-Tibet border — has climbed past 1,280, with thousands still listed as missing across the country, according to figures reported this week by Turkey's Anadolu Agency and other outlets tracking Nepal's disaster authority. At the Trishuli 3A project alone, the Independent Power Producers Association of Nepal says 557 workers remain unaccounted for, with roughly 115 believed to be trapped somewhere in that one tunnel. Nationally, upwards of 900 workers are still missing across a dozen hydropower construction sites along the same river system, with around 500 believed to be sealed inside tunnels rather than lost to open water — which is precisely why Friday's rescue matters as more than a single happy ending.

A tunnel, it turns out, can be a death trap and a lifeline depending on how the water moves through it. Investigators and rescue engineers say pockets of trapped air, higher side-passages, and control rooms sealed off by debris can, in the right circumstances, keep a person alive for over a week — dehydrated, freezing, terrified, but alive. That is the sliver of a possibility Nepal's government is now leaning on. Specialist search teams from India, China and South Korea have joined the Nepali Army in the effort, using listening equipment to check for movement and sound deeper in the tunnel networks before deciding where to dig next.

"We are just grateful to god"

Amir Maharjan learned his brother Kabir was alive the same way most of Nepal did — from a lawmaker's social media post, followed by a phone call. "I can't explain what we are feeling at the moment," he told the Associated Press, standing at the start of the road to Kathmandu with his family, already moving toward the hospital. Nepal's Communication Minister, Bikram Timilsina, wrote on Facebook that officials were "waiting for the rescue of more and more people," a sentence that reads almost plainly on the page and lands very differently once you know how many families in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and the surrounding districts are refreshing their phones right now waiting for a version of that same call.

It would be wrong to describe the mood on the ground as hopeful, exactly. Nine days is a long time, and the army confirmed that a body came out of that same tunnel alongside the two survivors. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told CBS News he is "thrilled" about the rescues and "hoping to see more survivors," but stopped well short of promising anything. What changed Friday isn't the odds. It's that, for one morning, the odds stopped being purely theoretical, because two men who should statistically have been long past saving walked out into the light instead.

A rescue inside a much larger, unfinished disaster

This is not a story that resolves on its own. As this site reported when the death toll first passed 1,000, scientists had flagged visible changes on the glacier days before it failed, and the early warning systems meant to protect workers camped in its path were, in the words of one geologist involved in the assessment, "very weak." Nothing about Friday's rescue changes that accounting. If anything, it sharpens it: the same tunnels that were supposed to generate power for a growing country turned out to be exactly stable enough, in a handful of pockets, to keep two men alive for over two hundred hours — which only underscores how close a functioning warning system might have come to saving far more people before the water ever reached them.

For now, Nepal's army says search and rescue operations at Trishuli 3A are continuing "around the clock," with crews working toward the sounds they heard Friday morning. Sah and Maharjan remain hospitalized in Kathmandu. Their families are with them. Several hundred other families are still waiting by a different kind of tunnel entrance, listening for the same thing.