Nepalese officials yesterday scrambled to get aid from the main airport to people left homeless and hungry by a devastating earthquake two days earlier, while thousands tired of waiting fled the capital, Kathmandu, for the surrounding plains.
By afternoon, the death toll from Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake had climbed to more than 3,700, and reports trickling in from remote areas suggested it would rise significantly.
A senior Nepalese Ministry of Home Affairs official said it could rise to as high as 5,000, in the worst such disaster in Nepal since 1934, when 8,500 people were killed.
Photo: AFP
Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport was hobbled by many employees not showing up for work, people trying to get out and a series of aftershocks which forced it to close several times since the quake.
Minister of Home Affairs Bam Dev Gautam was supervising aid delivery and arranging for passengers to leave the country.
Government officials said they needed more supplies of food, medicines, specialized rescue services and body bags.
Photo: AFP
“The morgues are getting totally full,” said Shankar Koirala, an official in the Prime Minister’s Office who is dealing with the disposal of bodies.
Many of Kathmandu’s 1 million residents have slept in the open since Saturday, either because their homes were flattened or they were terrified that aftershocks would bring them crashing down.
Thousands streamed out of the city yesterday. Roads leading from Kathmandu were jammed with people, some carrying babies, trying to climb onto buses or hitch rides aboard cars and trucks to the plains. Huge lines had formed at the airport.
Photo: Reuters
“We are escaping,” said Krishna Muktari, who runs a small grocery store in Kathmandu, standing at a road intersection.
The extent of Nepal’s disaster was only just emerging as reports of devastation began to come in from other parts of the country.
High in the Himalayas, hundreds of climbers were staying put at Mount Everest base camp, where a huge avalanche after the earthquake killed 18 people in the single worst disaster to hit the mountain.
Photo: AFP
Rescue teams, helped by clear weather, used helicopters to airlift scores of people stranded at higher altitudes, two at a time.
In Sindhupalchowk, about a three-hour drive northeast of Kathmandu, the death toll had reached 875 people and was expected to rise. In Dhading, close to the quake’s epicenter west of Kathmandu, 241 people were killed.
“There is nobody helping people in the villages. People are dying where they are,” said A. B. Gurung, a Nepalese soldier who was waiting in Dhading district for an Indian helicopter that had gone to his village, Darkha.
In Kathmandu, sick and injured people were lying out in the open, unable to find beds in the city’s hospitals. Surgeons set up an operating theater inside a tent in the grounds of Kathmandu Medical College.
A total of 3,726 people were confirmed killed in the quake, the government said yesterday. More than 6,500 were injured. Sixty-six were killed in India and at least 20 in Tibet, Xinhua news agency said.
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