Rescuers yesterday dug with their bare hands and bodies piled up in Nepal after an earthquake devastated the heavily crowded Kathmandu Valley, killing more than 2,200 people, and triggered a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.
In Everest’s worst disaster, the bodies of 18 climbers were recovered from the mountain yesterday after being caught in avalanches. A plane carrying the first 15 injured climbers landed in Kathmandu at about noon.
“There is a lot of confusion on the mountain. The toll will rise,” said Gelu Sherpa, one of the walking wounded among the first 15 injured climbers flown to Kathmandu. “Tents have been blown away,” he said, his head in bandages.
Photo: Reuters
Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 quake was the strongest in Nepal since the nation’s worst earthquake disaster, in 1934, which killed 8,500 people.
With Nepal’s government overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, India flew in medical supplies and relief crews, while China sent in a 60-strong emergency team.
India also said it had dispatched 285 members of its National Disaster Response Force. Pakistan’s military is sending four C-130 aircraft with a 30-bed hospital, search and rescue teams and relief supplies, the army said.
Photo: Reuters
Relief agencies said hospitals in the Kathmandu Valley were overflowing and running out of supplies.
Nepalese Army officer Santosh Nepal and a group of rescuers worked all night to open a passage into a collapsed building in the capital, Kathmandu. They had to use pick axes because bulldozers could not get through the ancient city’s narrow streets.
“We believe there are still people trapped inside,” he said, pointing at concrete debris and twisted reinforcement rods where a three-story residential building once stood.
Photo: Reuters
Bodies were still arriving yesterday morning at one hospital in Kathmandu, where police officer Sudan Shreshtha said his team had brought 166 corpses overnight.
“I am tired and exhausted, but I have to work and have the strength,” Shreshtha said as an ambulance brought three more victims to the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital.
Bodies were heaped in a dark room, some covered with cloth, some not. A boy aged about seven had his face half missing and his stomach bloated like a football. The stench of death was overpowering.
Photo: EPA
Outside, a 30-year-old woman who had been widowed wailed: “Oh Lord, oh God, why did you take him alone? Take me along with him also.”
Save the Children’s Peter Olyle said hospitals in the Kathmandu Valley were running out of storage room for bodies and supplies.
“There is a need for a government decision on bringing in kits from the military,” he said from Kathmandu.
Some buildings in Kathmandu toppled like houses of cards, others leaned at precarious angles, and partial collapses exposed living rooms and furniture in place and belongings stacked on shelves.
Rescuers, some wearing face masks to keep out the dust from collapsed buildings, scrambled over mounds of splintered timber and broken bricks in the hope of finding survivors. Some used their bare hands to fill small white buckets with dirt and rock.
Thousands of people spent the night outside in chilly temperatures and patchy rain, too afraid to return to their damaged homes.
Survivors yesterday wandered the streets clutching flimsy bed rolls and blankets, while others sat in the street cradling their children, surrounded by a few plastic bags of belongings.
Police put the death toll in Nepal at 2,263, with 5,838 hurt. At least 700 were killed in the capital.
There were nearly 1,000 climbers and sherpas on Everest when the first avalanche struck on Saturday, claiming the highest toll of any disaster on the mountain.
Climber photographs on social media sites showed tents and other structures at Everest base camp flattened by rocks and snow. The first reported photo of the avalanche showed a monster “cloud-like” mass of snow and rock descending down the mountain.
Helicopters were able to fly in yesterday morning as clouds lifted to evacuate the injured to a lower altitude, from where they were being flown to Kathmandu.
“All badly injured heli evacuated,” Romanian climber Alex Gavan tweeted from base camp. “Caring for those needing. Want sleep.”
Another 100 climbers higher up Everest at camps 1 and 2 were safe, but their way back down was blocked by damage to the treacherous Khumbu icefalls, Gavan said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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