When the August 26 flood tore through the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, Sanjay Sah sent everyone else out of the control room and stayed behind. Ten days later, a joint Nepal Army–Armed Police Force team pulled him and colleague Kabir Maharjan out alive.
Inside a blocked tunnel at the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, Sanjay Sah did not know if it was day or night. Sah was chanting Hare Krishna in the dark, unsure whether anyone outside even knew he was still alive. He would spend ten days like this before rescuers reached him.
Sah, a fourth-level employee of the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), and Kabir Maharjan, a supervisor at the same project, were trapped when a flash flood struck the Trishuli 3A site on August 26. Both were extracted alive ten days later, on September 4, in a joint rescue operation by the Nepal Army and the Armed Police Force. The Nepal Army has confirmed Sah is in normal condition; Maharjan was flown to Chhauni Hospital in Kathmandu for treatment.
Who They Are
Sanjay Sah works for the Nepal Electricity Authority as a fourth-level employee. He was at the Trishuli 3A site for routine maintenance work when the flood hit, and was leading the control room at the time.
Kabir Maharjan is a supervisor at the Trishuli 3A project. He was among those working at the site alongside Sah when the water came.
How They Survived
August 26 began as an ordinary day at the plant. But the control room was far more crowded than usual — instead of the usual four or five staff on duty, between 40 and 45 people were inside when the flood struck.
As the person in charge, Sah made a decision that would define the next ten days: he sent the others out to safety rather than leaving with them. He stayed behind, and ended up trapped along with four or five others, including Maharjan, in a section of the tunnel that the floodwater and debris had sealed off.
What followed was ten days with no clear way out and little sense of time passing. Sah has described the period as one of chanting and uncertainty, not knowing whether help was coming or whether anyone even knew where to look. The rescue came on September 4, when a joint Nepal Army and Armed Police Force team reached the trapped group and extracted them from the tunnel.
What They Shared Afterward
Sah has thanked the rescuers and described his survival as nothing short of a miracle. He has spoken about the chanting that carried him through the ten days he spent trapped underground, repeatedly invoking the name of Krishna in the darkness.
What has stayed with him most is the coincidence surrounding his rescue after spending ten days praying to Krishna, he was rescued on the very day Krishna was born. For Sah, it felt like he had been given a second life.
The two men emerged in different physical condition. The Nepal Army has confirmed Sah is normal, while Maharjan was flown directly to Chhauni Hospital in Kathmandu for treatment — a difference that has not yet been explained publicly.
The Family’s Ten Days
For Kabir Maharjan’s wife, Hirasobha Maharjan, the ten days were their own ordeal. She learned that her husband was alive not through any official channel but by scrolling Facebook and seeing his photo. Until then, she and the family did not know whether he was alive, or even whether he was inside the tunnel at all.
Hirasobha told BBC Nepali that the family had spent the days in tears, waiting for any word. Her account, given in the days after the rescue, is a reminder that the ten days underground were also ten days above ground — spent by families with no information and no way to help.
Trishuli 3A is a 60-megawatt run-of-river hydropower plant on the Trishuli River, commissioned in 2019 and operated by the Nepal Electricity Authority. According to project chief Awas Ojha, the site was among those hit hardest when the August 26 flood swept through the Trishuli-Bhotekoshi corridor.
For now, Kabir Maharjan remains at Chhauni Hospital, and Sanjay Sah has been reunited with his family after ten days that neither he nor they will forget.
