Nepal Floods Death Toll Crosses 1,000, Over 3,900 Missing As Tunnel Rescue Efforts Continue | N18G

Around 900 people who were working inside the hydropower tunnels in Nepal are among the thousands still missing this morning. The internal tunnels for some of those projects stretched several miles long. Others included rooms and resources that could allow people to survive, but that's only if the tunnel itself was not filled to the brim with the mud and debris and their air supply is holding out. Joining us now is Professor Arnold Dix. He's a geologist and engineer who is advising rescue teams that are going inside these tunnels. You have an expertise in trying to save people in tunnels. It's now day six after this catastrophic flooding in Nepal. When you look at the technical drawings and the satellite images and the aerial views of all of these tunnels, can you give us some sense if you think there is any chance that there are survivors still? Absolutely. So my role is in fact doing exactly that, looking at the as-built drawings, looking at the cross sections, looking at the calculations on what we found there on the ground. And you can see in that cross section you've got there, what we're looking at and what we think is like the Goldilocks zone. If anyone survived, it's up there in that golden area at the top. That area at the top is quite large. It's like a block of flats sort of thing. It's big because we're in a power station. But getting to it is proving to be really hard. So we believe that there's enough air. Of course it's pitch black. There's no food. There should be water. So human beings plus water means survival. And we're on it. And today we've had some good progress. I see there in your cross section the access tunnel down there towards the river. On the project that I'm involved with, the team have managed to now excavate around that access tunnel portal and also using explosives get into the top. And we're preparing now to tunnel inside a tunnel to try and make our way to the power station. In fact, yeah, that's some of the imagery of the one I'm talking about. And we're also, the other issue that we're dealing with, and we've had some very good progress today, is we're digging a huge trench from, well, the tunnel down to the river because we've discovered quite a lot of water in there as well. So we're trying to drain it. So one of the issues we're addressing at the moment is the possibility that water is banking up into the power station. It really is hour by hour. We're adjusting our strategy all the time. We're looking at, I mean, these are remarkable images that came out just a couple of days where people were saved from some of these air pockets, some of these areas inside of the tunnel. So you can see just how difficult it is to maneuver in this, what Anderson Cooper has been calling sort of like a liquid concrete, almost like it sucks you in when you stand on it. And so you see the crawling just to get in to these areas. Can you give me a sense of what is the most dangerous part of this? Because you mentioned using explosives, trying to get in to these areas that are just mounded with mud, and you just don't know how high it is. No, and we also don't know how much water is behind it. So when you're crawling in like that, and I recognize some of the faces on those men. So I work with these guys. We did a rescue in India a couple of years back. When we're working in like that, if we breach one of these plugs and there's water on the other side, it kills us. Like this, it's not just that the people on the other side are needing rescuing. We have to be really alert to hurting ourselves as well. That tunnel, because it wasn't completely overwhelmed, at least they've got access from the surface. The power station I'm dealing with mostly, we've had to dig down, like actually dig down something like 10 meters through a whole new landscape. But on day one, when I was called in, we couldn't find the power station. I couldn't find it. It had been completely eliminated from the surface. So even finding the spots to dig to find the tunnel, to crawl up the tunnel to find the power station has been an enormous challenge. It's just it's it's just an extraordinary. It is extraordinary to see the effort being made, but also just to think of the power of this cataclysmic flood that came barreling down in in the crevices and just just destroyed so many things and covered so much area. 10 meters is like 30 ft or so. It is extraordinary that they were able to rescue some people. And now the rescue mission continues with somewhere about 900 people missing just in those tunnels. Professor Arnold Dicks, thank you for your expertise. Really do appreciate it. John, my next guest is playing a key role, sometimes minute by minute, advising teams on the ground at those hydropower tunnels searching for survivors. Anybody? Arnold Dicks is a disaster and tunnel rescue expert who's joining us from Australia. He helped rescue more than 40 workers in a collapse tunnel in India in 2023. Arnold, thank you for being with us. You must be exhausted. I understand that you're in a car. You're between remote meetings with rescuers here in Nepal. How do you do that? What is the ladies who can tell us about the efforts to get into these tunnels, specifically into pockets where people how is it that some people can survive? Because a lot of these tunnels, they were covered in water, weren't they? Yeah. So we're dealing with something like what Rita was saying before, like we've never seen before. And but the good thing is these tunnels are very resilient. So some of the access tunnels, the parts that you're seeing and you've got the footage of, they obviously they're full of rocks and mud and what have you. But they lead to power stations which are buried deep in the mountain. And so my mission is to try and access the power stations where we're hoping that people have been able to survive the initial explosions. And, you know, they're there. So we're accessing those voids which are in the mountain through the tunnels mostly. And this is just being updated all the time. So if I get new information and I share it with my colleagues, we, you know, we revise our plans always. Nothing ever goes according to plan. This is like nothing we've ever seen before. I've never been involved where a disaster is in multiple locations simultaneously. And as you heard, it's completely transformed. It's like a huge bomb has gone off. We couldn't even find the power stations for the first couple of days. Well, that's the thing. I mean, I've talked to a number of rescuers at sites and just finding the location of the tunnel was extremely difficult. A lot of the rescuers I've talked to have talked about, I don't know if it's a storehouse or a powerhouse inside the tunnel, and they think that people may be in there. What would being in there, what is that, and why would that give somebody a better chance of surviving? Is there sealed off in some way? Yeah. So what it is, we're hoping that up inside the power station, power stations are built inside huge cavities like apartment blocks. And then inside those cavities are the turbines that generate the electricity. And then feeding those cavities are tunnels. So water in, water out for the turbines. But in addition to that, power cables, utility cables, ventilation, tunnels, all sorts of things like that. So with the engineering built diagrams, with satellite imagery, with drones, with the images coming out of those helicopters. So we'll get sent to us an image of a site coming out of a helicopter, try and compare it with the latest satellite data, then compare that with what the topographic map used to look like, and then figure out what's under there. And then we go hunting for the men in the power station. So I'm calling it like the Goldilocks Zone. We think that at the top of the powerhouse units, at a level up at the top, that's the most likely place where we will find people. And that's what all these missions are about, getting in, getting into those what we hope are safe places to rescue the people. The two sites that I've talked to rescuers at, both Nepali and Indian Army, they have not gotten proof of life, they have not heard sounds, and yet they are still continuing full speed ahead around the clock. Yeah, so that's what we do. So we're glass half full kind of guys, like the Indian guys you were talking to, they're probably, I haven't seen which ones they were, they worked with me on the Silkyara rescue a couple of years ago, where we got the 41 people out. Yes. We presume people are alive, and until we know anything different, we're optimists, and we will do whatever it takes, we'll adjust whatever strategy we've got, we'll use whatever tools are available, and we'll find them. And that's our mission, that's what we do. And it's dangerous. And the Indian colonel I talked to was, sorry, I was just saying the Indian colonel who I met, who's overseeing the operation that I saw, I believe he has two doctorates in tunnels, and I mean, his knowledge was extraordinary and incredibly impressive. Arnold Dix, I know you are incredibly busy, I appreciate you spending the time with us that you have, it's such an honor to talk to you. Go ahead. No, that'd be Colonel Parakshit, I think. Was that Colonel? Yes, it is, yes. But you're right, the expertise in India is, yeah, so, yeah, he and I, we worked like brothers in the rescue in 23. Great guy, really warm heart. And this is the other thing, not just engineering, like what the chopper pilot was just saying before, this is about humanitarian, this is about being a decent human being, this is like 21st century humans behaving responsibly. So, yeah, he's a great guy and his team are fantastic. Yeah. Well, Arnold, it's got to be surreal for you to be in Australia and yet on the front lines here in Nepal at the same time, and it's an honor to talk to you. Arnold, thank you so, so much.