Bad weather has cut links with a remote village in Nepal where dozens of villagers and trekkers are believed to be buried under an avalanche set off by last month’s devastating earthquake, officials said yesterday.
The death toll from the April 25 earthquake in the Himalayan nation has reached 7,557, the Nepalese government said.
About 100 bodies were recovered on Saturday and Sunday at Langtang Village, about 60km northeast of Kathmandu, which is on a trekking route popular with Westerners. The entire village, which includes 55 guesthouses for trekkers, was wiped out by the avalanche and rescuers are digging in the snow for signs of about 120 others believed buried.
Photo: AFP
Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district officer in the area where Langtang is, said authorities had not made contact with Langtang for more than 24 hours because of bad weather.
“We hope to send a rescue helicopter today to the area,” he said yesterday. “We will know the situation then.”
The dead include at least seven foreigners, but just two had been identified, he said.
The Nepalese government has begun asking foreign teams to wrap up search-and-rescue operations as hopes of finding people alive in the rubble recede.
“They can leave. If they are also specialists in clearing the rubble, they can stay,” Ministry of Home Affairs official Rameshwor Dangal told reporters on Monday.
An EU source said that just about 60 people from the 28-nation bloc were still unaccounted for. Last week, a senior EU official had estimated that about 1,000 EU citizens were missing after the quake.
The number is “going down by the hour” as rescue teams reach remoter areas, the EU source said.
A US Department of State spokesman said helicopters chartered by the US embassy in Kathmandu had rescued 17 US citizens in total from remote areas hit by the quake. The US has provided US$14.2 million in humanitarian aid since the quake.
The Nepalese government has said it has not closed Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, to climbers, although the route to the summit has been damaged by the earthquake. At least 18 people were killed on Everest when the earthquake struck.
However, climbers who stayed in villages close to the Everest base camp are packing their gear and leaving the mountain because Sherpa guides have refused to rebuild the climbing route, officials told reporters yesterday.
A few climbers still wanted to pursue their climbs, but without the route fixed over the Khumbu Icefall, it was not possible.
Sherpas have said they would not rebuild the climbing route because of safety and time reasons. It would be the second consecutive year that the climbing season has been called off because of deaths on the world’s highest peak.
The UN has said 8 million of Nepal’s 28 million people were affected by the quake, with at least 2 million needing tents, water, food and medicines over the next three months.
The UN Children’s Fund said more than half a million children were being vaccinated to prevent measles outbreaks. About 1.7 million children remain in urgent need of humanitarian aid in the worst-hit areas, it added.
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