More than 150 killed in Nepal earthquake
BBC Online :
More than 150 people have been killed after an earthquake struck remote western Nepal on Friday.
Security forces have been deployed to help rescue efforts in the rugged districts of Jajarkot and West Rukum, 500km (310 miles) west of Kathmandu.
Strong tremors were felt far away in the Nepalese capital and in cities in neighbouring India, including Delhi.
An army spokesman said more than 100 people had been injured. Jajarkot’s hospital is packed with the wounded.
One survivor, Geethakumari Bista, told the BBC that rescuers saved her elder daughter, but she lost her younger daughter.
“We three were in the same room on the top floor. Everything happened so suddenly. We couldn’t understand what was happening,” she recalled.
After their house collapsed, they were buried in the rubble.
“People shouted around. The armed police came and I shouted: ‘I am alive, too’… First they rescued my elder daughter by carrying her out and taking her downstairs. Unfortunately, they couldn’t save my younger one. She was 14 years old.”
Three more tremors were felt within an hour of the quake. Many people spent the rest of the night in the open because of fear of further quakes and damage to their houses.
Video footage on local media showed crumbled facades of multi-storied brick houses. People were pictured digging through rubble in the dark to pull survivors from the remains of collapsed buildings in posts on social media.
Unicef Nepal said that they were assessing the damage and the toll of the disaster on children and families.
Nepal’s Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, arrived in the affected region on Saturday, after expressing his “deep sorrow” at the loss of life and property wrought by the quake, on social media platform X.
He said he had ordered security agencies to immediately launch rescue and relief operations.
But those search and rescue operations are being hampered by roads becoming blocked by landslides that were triggered by the quake.
“Houses have collapsed. People rushed out of their homes.
I am out in the crowd of terrified residents,” said a police official from the region, Santosh Rokka, who spoke to Reuters immediately after the earthquake.
“We were sleeping. We felt like dying,” says Laxman Pun, an earthquake survivor.
Their house have been damaged and they could survive “with much difficulty”, he told BBC Nepali. “We don’t know where we will be able to stay. We will probably need tents.”
“Our house shook back and forth like a swing. As we rushed outside, there were houses falling and dust everywhere.
We couldn’t see anything and so we again moved inside. We came out after the tremors stopped,” said Siddha Bohora, a bank manager from Jajarkot.
In Athaviskot municipality, one of the areas worst affected by the earthquake, three people who had critical injuries were sent to hospitals in Surkhet by an army helicopter for further treatment.
Municipality chief Ravi KC warned that because of the cold weather, the victims who lost their houses will “suffer more”. The municipality has a population of about 35,000 and hundreds of houses were completely damaged, according to KC.
Local government officials, police and army have been deployed for rescue operations, as there are still bodies left to be recovered from the rubble.
The earthquake was recorded at 23:47 local time (18:02 GMT), according to Nepal’s Monitoring and Research Centre. The US Geological Survey measured the earthquake at a magnitude of 5.6 and said it was a shallow earthquake, meaning it happened closer to the earth’s surface.
