| Washington Post | - |
NEW
DELHI - A major earthquake rocked Nepal on Tuesday, killing more than
50 people, collapsing homes and buildings and sending a panicked rush
into the streets less than three weeks after the country's most
devastating quake in decades.
Dozens killed as another major quake hits Nepal weeks after deadly tragedy
Politicians in parliament fled from their seats. In remote villages, houses that were already wobbling collapsed for good this time. Mountains cracked and slid.
The temblor was the largest jolt in the Himalayan nation since the devastating April 25 earthquake that claimed more than 8,000 lives and left more than half a million homes flattened or damaged. The death toll grimly rose throughout the day — to more than 50 combined in Nepal and northern India so far, authorities said.
With renewed search and rescue efforts underway, a U.S. Marine helicopter went missing Tuesday near Charikot, a town about 45 miles east of the capital, the U.S. military said. According to Army Maj. Dave Eastburn, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, the UH-1Y “Huey” helicopter was carrying two Nepali soldiers and six U.S. Marines when it was declared missing while conducting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations.
Eastburn said personnel of the military’s Joint Task Force 505 were responding to the emergency.
An
earthquake centered close to Mount Everest that could be felt as far
away as northern India and Bangladesh struck Tuesday afternoon, felling
buildings already weakened by last month’s quake. (Reuters)
Many of them had just tentatively begun returning to their homes, but they vowed that they would be sleeping outside under trekking tents or in their cars again Tuesday night. Nepali police appealed on Twitter for residents to stay outside in the open, but off the roads and off their telephones.
Overwhelmed hospitals would be again treating patients outside in tents for fear of aftershocks, even critically ill patients. At Kathmandu Civil Service Hospital, dozens of injured were being brought in; friends and relatives ferried them on improvised stretchers, on motorcycles and in cars.
At Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, Baburam Tamang, 40, a day laborer, writhed on the floor, crying. Both his legs were badly fractured.
He had been working to repair a roof on a house in Bhaktapur, the damaged temple town not far from Kathmandu, when the quake hit, trapping him under wood and bricks.
“Suddenly the quake came and I fell down from the second floor,” he said. “I thought . . . I may die there.”
He was quickly rescued by neighbors. They delivered him to Nepali soldiers, who brought him to the hospital.
An
Indian child is held by his father after receiving treatment at
Siliguri Hospital in Siliguri on May 12, 2015, after falling during an
earthquake. (Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images) The quake struck just as the South Asian country was trying to get back on its feet after last month’s devastation. Shops and markets were starting to reopen, with electricity restored. Now the most wide-ranging relief effort in the country’s history has been stopped in its tracks.
The country’s military rescue operations will run parallel with relief operations, according to Khagaraj Adhikari, Nepal’s minister of health and population. Many foreign rescue teams had already left the country, he said, but the Nepali government would ask those remaining to stay until the new crisis has passed.
In recent days, rescue and aid workers had joined doctors, Nepali military and police and Red Cross workers to reach flattened villages in the mountains where they were still searching for and cremating the dead.
Jennifer Hardy, 33, a worker for Catholic Relief Services based in Baltimore, said she was helping hand out tarpaulins and hygiene kits in a remote village in the hard-hit Gorkha area when the quake hit just after lunchtime.
“People started immediately crying, even though we were in a big open area,” she said. She clutched an elderly grandmother for support. Around them, the leaves of mango trees began to fall like snow.
Things worsened when the villagers began to hear the rumbling and collapsing of nearby buildings, then could not reach family members on jammed phone lines, Hardy said.
“That was almost more stressful than the earthquake itself. It was heartbreaking to see them so distressed. They kept crying and crying for hours,” Hardy said.
In Tuesday’s chaos, many aid workers were feared trapped. Nichola Jones, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Nepal, said a Canadian medical team was trapped in the Tatopani area, close to the quake’s epicenter.
Team members reported that a nearby mountain had dissolved into a rocky landslide, leaving them miraculously alive and covered in dust, but essentially stranded.
“That’s going to be the challenge for us now, to get back to these remote areas where we had just been managing to reach in the last few days,” Jones said. The rainy season is fast approaching, and landslides will be constant concern.
Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, a spokesman for Nepal's Ministry of Home Affairs, said authorities have received many calls from aid organizations asking for help in finding missing relief workers. Some have been located through local police, but much information remains unavailable. So far the ministry has not received word of any fatalities among relief workers in Tuesday's quake.
The U.S. Geological Survey said this latest earthquake struck Nepal early Tuesday afternoon about 11 miles southeast of Kodari, near the India-China border. The reverberations were felt hundreds of miles away in New Delhi, Bangladesh and Tibet.
“Rocks fell from the mountains,” Wang Wenxiang, vice chief of the Jilong county government in Tibet, was quoted as saying by the China News Service. Houses were collapsed or damaged, and a road to the Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge — a key link for mountain climbers — was cut off because of damage.
No foreign climbers remained on Mount Everest, after the initial earthquake on April 25 triggered an avalanche that plowed through the base camp and left at least 20 climbers dead. The spring climbing season had been called off, and most of the foreigners had been evacuated or hiked down from camp themselves. It was not clear how many of their sherpas, the Nepali mountain guides, or staff had remained behind.
Ang Tshering, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, said he spoke to some sherpas in high-altitude villages on the way to Mount Everest via satellite phone just minutes after the earthquake hit. The sherpas said their villages had been badly hit by the quake.
“A lot of houses had collapsed because they were already cracked from the last earthquake,” Tshering said. A death toll from that area was unknown.
A tent city becomes a community
Ancient temple a casualty of the quake
Annie Gowen is The Post’s India bureau chief and has reported for the Post throughout South Asia and the Middle East.
Rama
Lakshmi has been with The Post's India bureau since 1990. She is a
staff writer and India social media editor for Post World.
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