Ten Days Sealed in a Flooded Tunnel, Chinese Worker Lu Haitao Climbed to Survive — and Did
Rescuers in Nepal have pulled a Chinese worker alive from the debris-sealed tunnel of a hydropower project, ten days after an August mudslide buried the border crossing at Gyirong. Lu Haitao survived by climbing to the tunnel's highest point and shouting at every light he saw.
When the floodlight finally reached him on Friday, Lu Haitao could hardly believe what it meant. The Chinese worker had spent ten days sealed inside the underground tunnel of a hydropower plant in Nepal's Rasuwa district, ever since a debris flow roared down from the Chinese border on August 26 and entombed the tunnel's exits in mud. On September 5, a Nepalese rescue team reached him — alive, and reportedly without serious injury.
His survival, according to both the Chinese ambassador, who visited him within hours, and the head of the Nepalese army's medical directorate, came down to a decision made in the first minutes. When the slurry broke into the tunnel, Lu climbed — up into the bore's highest reaches, grabbing onto a pipeline at the crown of the tunnel where the flood's first and deadliest surge passed below him. Then he waited in the dark. Every time he saw a light in the distance, CCTV reported, he shouted himself hoarse; for days the rescuers never heard him.
The geography, reconstructed in detail by Chinese commenters this week, explains both the catastrophe and the margin of survival. The mudslide struck the Gyirong border crossing — the overland gateway between Tibet and Nepal — around 11 a.m. on August 26, then traveled roughly 60 kilometers down the Trishuli river gorge, still moving at around 70 km/h when it reached the Trishuli 3A hydropower station twenty minutes later. The station's access tunnel runs entirely underground, which is why the structure itself held while its entrances filled with mud — leaving a man inside with finite air, food and water, and no way out but the one the rescuers eventually dug.
The rescue is a turn in a disaster we have followed as the toll climbed past 900 dead, with nearly 100 Chinese nationals listed as missing. Some of those missing were at the border port itself; newly released drone footage shot 23 minutes into the disaster shows why hopes were faint — the debris flow reached 60 meters deep and sheared away the highway to the crossing.
It is also, quietly, a story about the machinery that followed the mud. Staff at police stations along the Tibetan side have been telephoning everyone whose records show they crossed at Gyirong this season, a dragnet Baidu's hot list framed as "a call from Gyirong — please answer", to confirm each traveler is alive. In Lu Haitao's case, the answer arrived ten days late — and was the one his rescuers said they had stopped expecting.