Nepal earthquake: two rescued after five days in Kathmandu building wreckage
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Version 0 of 1. Two people were pulled out alive from the wreckage of buildings in Kathmandu on Thursday, in rare moments of joy for rescue teams five days after the earthquake that devastated Nepal. Watching crowds cheered as Nepalese rescuers, assisted by a US disaster team, pulled a 15-year-old boy from the debris of a seven-storey structure, where he had reportedly stayed alive by eating jars of ghee and drinking water dripping from his clothes. Just streets away, rescuers worked into the night to free a woman from the rubble of a hotel. The teenager, named variously in reports as Pemba Tamang and Pemba Lama, was conscious and responsive, according to the police officer who crawled into a gap to reach him. “He thanked me when I first approached him,” LB Basnet was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “He told me his name, his address, and I gave him some water. I assured him we were near to him.” The dust-covered teenager, who had been trapped in a small gap behind a bike under two metres of rubble, was eventually lifted blinking into the sunlight and placed on a stretcher, with a blue brace around his neck and a drip in his arm. Related: Nepal earthquake: how to donate Libby Weiss, from an Israeli military-run medical centre, said he was doing well and did not appear to have any major injuries. “I don’t have any logical explanation. It is miraculous. It is a wonderful thing to see in all this destruction,” she told AFP. “He was under the rubble for 120 hours and it is certainly the longest we have heard anybody of being under the rubble and surviving. “We understand he didn’t have any food and just two jars of ghee, which he had at the time he was under the rubble.” The second survivor was carried by stretcher to a waiting ambulance after Nepalese soldiers and a huge team of experts from France, Norway and Israel worked to rescue her. “She was injured but she was conscious and talking,” a Nepalese army major told AFP at the scene. “She has been sent to a military hospital,” he said, identifying the woman as a kitchen worker in her mid-30s called Krishna Devi Khadka. “It is as though she had been born again.” However, such stories remain rare following the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, the worst in the country for 80 years, which now has a confirmed death toll of 5,489, with 11,000 injured and around 600,000 homes destroyed or damaged, according the UN. Officials said Pemba had been talking to two other people trapped in the rubble until early Thursday, but they had gone silent. The body of a teenager was removed soon afterwards. Photographs were published by local media on Wednesday of a four-month-old baby recovered from rubble on Sunday and the rescue of an 11-year-old girl, though it was not clear when she was rescued. Some reports suggested she was also pulled free on Sunday. Girl, 11, rescued from Bhaktapur Dattatreya Sq after 90 hrs under rubble by Nepal Army. #NepalQuake pic.twitter.com/AAb9EmLnv7 Emergency teams have mainly been pulling bodies from the rubble, a task made all the more perilous by more than 70 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale, according to the Indian Meteorological Department in Delhi. Rain has left many people with the dilemma of risking a return to damaged homes which could collapse in an aftershock or sleeping in tents or other temporary shelters. Related: Survivors pulled from rubble of Nepal earthquake – in pictures Prabhu Dutta, a 27-year-old banker, told AP he had slept amid the cracked walls of his Kathmandu home for the past two nights, but was worried by the continued aftershocks, calling them a “morning wakeup notice”. He said: “I am worried about whether they will continue for a long time or whether it will calm down.” Large numbers have left Kathmandu on free buses provided by the government, often to check on the fate of relatives in other regions. “I have to get home. It has already been so many days,” Shanti Kumari, travelling with her seven-year-old daughter to eastern Nepal, told AP. “I want to get at least a night of peace.” While rescue teams were out in Kathmandu despite the rain, helicopters could not fly to the worst-hit areas in the countryside. “There may not be any more survivors,” Rameshwor Dandal, chief of the disaster management centre at Nepal’s home ministry, said on Thursday. “The rain is adding to the problems. Nature seems to be against us.” The British government said on Thursday that it was sending three CH47 Chinook helicopters to Nepal to help. The Department for International Development (Dfid) said it hoped that the aircraft, due to leave RAF Brize Norton in the coming days, would help “organisations already on the ground to immediately get aid supplies to more isolated areas”. Justine Greening, the international development secretary, said: “Conditions in Nepal are dire, but the UK is determined to do everything it can to help support Nepal and its people.” The government said that British embassy staff were also providing practical help to more than 300 British nationals in the affected area. Anger over the slow pace of the rescue flared on Wednesday with protests outside parliament. In the interior, villagers blocked trucks carrying supplies, demanding the government do more to hasten the distribution of aid that has flooded into the country but has been slow to reach those in need. The official death toll does not include the 19 people killed at Mount Everest – five foreign climbers and 14 Nepalese Sherpa guides – when the quake caused an avalanche at base camp on the world’s highest peak. Related: Extent of the destruction from Nepal's earthquake The UN has launched an appeal for $415m (£270m) in assistance, while Nepal is appealing to foreign governments for more helicopters to help with aid efforts. Rescue teams have yet to reach some more distant regions to assess the devastation, and Nepal’s prime minister, Sushil Koirala, has warned the final death toll could reach 10,000. As well as the dead there has been a huge impact on many of those injured. Reuters spoke to one 26-year-old man, Rishi Ram Khanal, who had just left his wife and infant son in rural western Nepal to travel via Kathmandu to Dubai to begin a cleaning job, borrowing about £700 to finance the trip. The quake left him buried for 80 hours in the debris of a five-storey guesthouse, drinking his own urine to survive. While he survived doctors had to amputate a leg. Khanal said it would have been better if he had died. “What will I do for the rest of my life? My chance to work in Dubai is gone and I cannot even work as a farmer,” he told Reuters from a hospital bed. “I don’t even have the money to buy a wheelchair now. How will I spend the rest of life and support my family?” |