Nepal death toll passes 5,000 as officials admit to early mistakes
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THE death toll from the devastating earthquake in Nepal passed 5,000 yesterday as officials conceded they had made mistakes in their initial response, leaving survivors stranded in remote villages waiting for aid and relief.
Over 200 Nepalis protested outside parliament in the capital, Kathmandu, demanding the government increase the number of buses going to the interior hills and improve distribution of aid.
“I haven’t been able to contact my family members in the village,” said Kayant Panday, one of the protesters, who said he woke at 4am to get a bus to a badly hit area but was not able to find one. “There is no way I can get information whether they are dead or alive.”
The government has yet to fully assess the devastation wrought by Saturday’s 8.1-magnitude quake, unable to reach many mountainous areas despite aid supplies and personnel pouring in from around the world.
There was mounting anger and frustration, with many Nepalis sleeping under makeshift tents for a fourth night since the country’s worst quake in more than 80 years.
“This is a disaster on an unprecedented scale. There have been some weaknesses in managing the relief operation,” Nepal’s Communication Minister Minendra Rijal said as he vowed improvements.
Prime Minister Sushil Koirala has said the death toll could reach 10,000, with information on casualties and damage from far-flung villages and towns yet to come in.
That would surpass the 8,500 who died in a 1934 earthquake, the last disaster on this scale to hit the Himalayan nation of 28 million people between India and China.
Rescue helicopters have been unable to land in some remote mountainous areas.
Shambhu Khatri, a technician on board one of the helicopters, said entire hillsides had collapsed in parts of the worst-hit Gorkha district, burying settlements, and access was almost impossible.
A health official in Laprak, a village in the district best known as the home of the Gurkha soldiers, estimated that 1,600 of the 1,700 houses in the village had been destroyed.
An official from Nepal’s home ministry said the number of confirmed deaths had risen to 5,006. Almost 10,000 were injured in Nepal, and more than 80 were also killed in India and China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
In Kathmandu and other cities, hospitals quickly overflowed with injured soon after the quake, with many being treated out in the open or not at all.
Foreign Secretary Shanker Das Bairagi appealed for specialist doctors from overseas, as well as for search-and-rescue teams despite earlier suggestions from officials that Nepal did not need more such assistance.
“Our top priority is for relief and rescue teams. We need neurologists, orthopedic surgeons and trauma surgeons,” Bairagi said.
Experts from a Polish NGO that has an 87-strong team in Nepal have said the chances of finding people alive in the ruins five days after the quake were “next to zero.”
In one of the first signs that normal life was returning, some street vendors started selling fruit in Kathmandu, but others said they were too scared to open shops because buildings had been so badly damaged.
The quake also triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest that killed at least 19 climbers and guides, including four foreigners, the worst disaster on the world’s highest peak.
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