SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been a month since a glacier and its bedrock collapsed into a river valley in the Himalayas, triggering flash floods. More than 7,500 people have died or cannot be found. And that includes workers who were trapped in a dozen hydropower plants built alongside the stretch of a river in Nepal - plants that are now buried. One tunneling expert, Arnold Dix, described it like this.
ARNOLD DIX: Like, they're just not there.
SIMON: And as NPR's Diaa Hadid reports, that's triggered scrutiny over how these projects are being built in the Himalayas.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Rescuers haven't found any survivors in one of the biggest hydropower plants that was buried under the mud. The Nepali army estimates there were 50 people there. It's called the Upper Trishuli-1 and cost over half $1 billion. It was backed with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans led by the World Bank. It was under construction. Now it's under the mud. These buried hydropower plants were built along the stretch of a steep river valley called the Trishuli.
AUSTIN LORD: This, in particular, is a really high-risk area to build dams. But nonetheless, the industry started there, and it gained momentum.
HADID: Austin Lord works on disaster risk reduction in the Himalayan region at the Stimson Center. Lord says the area is particularly vulnerable to glacial lakes bursting, and this was the third year in a row there had been deadly floods. But he says the momentum to build here began more than a decade ago because there were roads and proximity to the border with Chinese-administered Tibet, so supplies could easily come in.
LORD: It's an obvious choice for a hydropower developer or someone looking through that lens.
HADID: But Lord and others argue that developers long diminish the chance of one-off events, which allowed them to greenlight projects that perhaps should not have proceeded at that scale or design.
LORD: I've called it strategic ignorance.
HADID: Experts also told NPR that developers typically did not account for the risk of building so many projects in the same area, which is why critics like Parineeta Dandekar accuse the World Bank of crafting a myopic risk assessment that allowed it to go ahead with the Upper Trishuli-1 project. She says it ignored the danger from the constant blasting and dynamiting of mountains to build these projects, including to carve out tunnels.
PARINEETA DANDEKAR: Imagine the amount of stressors at play when it's 12 times across a single steep river basin in Himalayas.
HADID: The World Bank said in a statement that preventative measures were taken against floods, landslides and other events. The bank said it reflected evidence when the assessment was made in 2018. And experts do disagree on whether the constant building had an impact on the events of August 26 that led to devastating flash flooding. Dipak Gyawali is a hydropower engineer with the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology.
DIPAK GYAWALI: Dynamiting is almost nothing. It's like scratching on top of a skin. That's all.
HADID: Dynamiting in the Himalayas is like scratching your skin. Two scientific assessments suggest a different man-made problem was at play that triggered the flash floods in August. Global warming exacerbated the melting of a glacier in its bedrock. They snapped off in August, falling into the river valley, triggering flash floods. And it's unclear if any major backer took the rapidly changing climate into account for the Upper Trishuli-1 Project.
One major funder was the Asian Development Bank. In 2024, they dispatched independent experts who visited the site, and they reported that no climate resilience assessment was undertaken. The independent experts described that as a significant gap. The Asian Development Bank hasn't responded to NPR's question as to whether that assessment was ultimately undertaken. Dandekar, who is critical of this hydropower project, says the World Bank and other backers need to ask...
DANDEKAR: Are they safe for the ecosystems and communities and the workers, or are we just putting them in danger over and over again? Where does the accountability lie?
HADID: Accountability for the dozens of workers who are now entombed in these hydropower plants. Advocates say they hope this devastating flood might prompt a rethink of how hydropower is constructed across the Himalayas. They're particularly worried about a massive hydropower plant and dam that China began building in Tibet last year. It's estimated it will provide power to 300 million people. Chinese authorities say the hydro project is safe. But in July, Chinese geologists reported that the dam was being constructed over an active fault line, risking the integrity of the project's infrastructure.
SHYAM SARAN: If something happens there, it is going to be a monumental disaster.
HADID: That's retired Indian Ambassador Shyam Saran, who served as the prime minister's special envoy for climate change. The Chinese project is being built near the border with India. One accident, he says, could wipe away downstream communities in his country. But even as India worries about the impact, it's building its own massive hydropower plant and dam just downstream.
Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Mumbai.
(SOUNDBITE OF BONOBO SONG, "KERALA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
