KATHMANDU, Nepal — On a recent September day, Sumana Shrestha Amatya stood alongside other protesters in the Nepali capital, urging the government to work faster to find their loved ones, trapped inside hydropower plants since flash floods devastated miles of a river valley in late August. Amatya says she hasn't heard from officials about her husband, Sunil, a geologist. Still, she acknowledged the scale of the disaster that the government was grappling with: "It was like a Himalayan tsunami." It's a description other Nepalis have used for the events of Aug. 26, when a glacier and its bedrock spanning more than 3,800 feet in width collapsed into a river valley, some 4,000 feet below.
That triggered 30-foot-high waves of boulders, water and ice that surged for miles downstream. It swept away a multistory border building and some 70 bridges and miles of highway, and buried 12 hydropower plants under mud and boulders along the Trishuli River, which was badly impacted by the floods. Some 1,400 bodies have been recovered in Nepal, and more than 5,000 remain unaccounted for.
The dead and missing include 121 people who were trapped in hydropower plants, according to Brig. Subas Jung Thapa of the Nepali army, which is leading rescue efforts. He spoke in early September.
It took days just to find the power plants under the mud. It was like "a bomb's gone off," said Arnold Dix, a tunneling expert helping with rescue efforts. "It's removed the power stations from the surface, like they're just not there." Only three men were found alive in the plants since rescue efforts began.
It is those hydropower plants that have received the most scrutiny in regional media since the floods, with experts reviving questions about whether developers had properly assessed the risks of building them in the Himalayas. "We need to understand what is happening now in Nepal can happen in other parts of the Himalayas," says C.P. Rajendran, an Indian geoscientist who has been critical of big construction works in the Himalayas. (Rajendran, like many Indians, uses initials for his first name.) Critics have also focused on the role of international institutions like the World Bank, which has long supported some of these hydropower projects and their associated dams.
They include one of the biggest hydropower projects in the river basin, known as the Upper Trishuli-1, which cost Nepal over half a billion dollars. It was backed by about $300 million in loans and equity by two arms of the World Bank. The Upper-Trishuli-1 was under construction.
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