Dubai: The desperate effort to save lives in earthquake-ravaged Nepal intensified yesterday as aid flights arrived bearing emergency medical teams, search-and-rescue equipment, and tarps for shelter.
Governments, charities and development agencies also announced broader plans for further help set to arrive in the coming days and weeks.
Nepalese officials scrambled to get aid from the main airport to people left homeless and hungry by the devastating earthquake two days earlier, while thousands tired of waiting fled the capital Kathmandu for the surrounding plains.
By last evening, the death toll from Saturday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake had crossed 4,000 and reports trickling in from remote areas suggested it would rise significantly.
A senior interior ministry official said it could reach as much as 5,000, in the worse such disaster in Nepal since 1934, when 8,500 people were killed.
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. Priority at the damaged international airport was given to aid flights carrying either doctors or search teams.
Government officials said they needed more supplies of food, medicines, specialised rescue services and body bags.
“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.
Families lit funeral pyres for the dead in towns and across the countryside.
The Asian Development Bank yesterday announced a $3 million grant to Nepal and said an additional $200 million will be made available for rehabilitation projects needed to help rebuild the Himalayan country.
Many of Kathmandu’s one 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.
Yesterday, thousands streamed out of the city. 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. Long queues had formed at the airport.
High in the Himalayas, hundreds of climbers were staying put at Mount Everest base camp, where a huge avalanche after the earthquake killed 17 people in the single worst disaster to hit the world’s highest mountain.
Rescue teams, helped by clear weather, used helicopters to airlift scores of people stranded at higher altitudes, two at a time.
- With inputs from AP & Reuters