Tired of waiting for aid, angry Nepalis block roads

             

JHARIBAR/SINDHUPALCHOWK, Nepal (Reuters) - People stranded in remote villages and towns across Nepal were still waiting for aid and relief to arrive on Tuesday, four days after a devastating earthquake destroyed buildings and roads and killed more than 4,600 people.

The government has yet to assess the full scale of the damage wrought by Saturday's 7.9 magnitude quake, unable to reach many mountainous areas despite aid supplies and personnel pouring in from around the world.

Prime Minister Sushil Koirala told Reuters the death toll could reach 10,000, as information on damage from far-flung villages and towns has 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.

"The government is doing all it can for rescue and relief on a war footing," Koirala said. "It is a challenge and a very difficult hour for Nepal."

Nepal told aid agencies it did not need more foreign rescue teams to help search for survivors, because its government and military could cope, the national head of the United Nations Development Programme told Reuters.

Experts said the chance of finding people alive in the ruins was slim more than four days after disaster struck.

"After the first 72 hours the survival rate drops dramatically and we are on day four," said Wojtek Wilk of the Polish Center for International Aid, an NGO which has six medical staff and 81 firefighters in Nepal. "On the fifth day it's next to zero."

In a rare glimmer of hope, a Nepali-French rescue team pulled a 28-year-old man, Rishi Khanal, from a collapsed apartment block in Kathmandu after he had spent around 80 hours trapped in a room with three dead bodies.

In Jharibar, a village in the hilly Gorkha district of Nepal close to the quake's epicentre, Sunthalia was not so lucky.

Her husband away in India and with no help in sight, she dug for hours in the rubble of her collapsed home on Saturday to recover the bodies of two of her children, a 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son.

Another son aged four miraculously survived.

HUNDREDS KILLED IN LANDSLIDES

In Barpak, further north, rescue helicopters were unable to find a place to land. On Tuesday, soldiers had started to make their way overland, first by bus, then by foot.

Army helicopters also circled over Laprak, another village in the district best known as the home of Gurkha soldiers.

A local health official estimated that 1,600 of the 1,700 houses there had been razed. Helicopters dropped food packets in the hope that survivors could gather them up.

In Sindhupalchowk, about 3.5 hours by road northeast of Kathmandu, the earthquake was followed by landslides, killing 1,182 people and seriously injuring 376. A local official said he feared many more were trapped and more aid was needed.

"There are hundreds of houses where our people have not been able to reach yet," said Krishna Pokharel, the district administrator. "There is a shortage of fuel, the weather is bad and there is not enough help coming in from Kathmandu."

International aid has begun arriving in Nepal, but disbursement has been slow, partly because aftershocks have sporadically closed the airport.

According to the home (interior) ministry, the confirmed death toll stands at 4,682, with more than 9,240 injured.

The United Nations said 8 million people were affected by the quake and that 1.4 million people were in need of food.

Nepal's most deadly quake in 81 years also triggered a huge avalanche on Mount Everest that killed at least 18 climbers and guides, including four foreigners, the worst single disaster on the world's highest peak.

All the climbers who had been stranded at camps high up on Everest had been flown by helicopters to safety, mountaineers reported on Tuesday.

Up to 250 people were missing after an avalanche hit a village on Tuesday in Rasuwa district, a popular trekking area to the north of Kathmandu, district governor Uddhav Bhattarai said.

FRUIT VENDORS RETURN TO STREETS

A series of aftershocks, severe damage from the quake, creaking infrastructure and a lack of funds have complicated rescue efforts in the poor country of 28 million people sandwiched between India and China.

In Kathmandu, youths and relatives of victims were digging into the ruins of destroyed buildings and landmarks.

"Waiting for help is more torturous than doing this ourselves," said Pradip Subba, searching for the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law in the debris of Kathmandu's historic Dharahara tower.

The 19th century tower collapsed on Saturday as weekend sightseers clambered up its spiral stairs. Scores of people were killed when it crumpled.

Elsewhere in the capital's ancient Durbar Square, groups of young men cleared rubble from around an ancient temple, using pickaxes, shovels and their hands. Several policemen stood by, watching.

Heavy rain late on Tuesday slowed the rescue work.

In the capital, as elsewhere, thousands have been sleeping on pavements, roads and in parks, many under makeshift tents.

Hospitals are full to overflowing, while water, food and power are scarce.

There were some signs of normality returning on Tuesday, with fruit vendors setting up stalls on major roads and public buses back in operation.

Officials acknowledged that they were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.

"The big challenge is relief," said Chief Secretary Leela Mani Paudel, Nepal's top bureaucrat. "We are really desperate for more foreign expertise to pull through this crisis."

India and China, which have used aid and investment to court Kathmandu for years, were among the first contributors to the international effort to support Nepal's stretched resources.

(Additional reporting by Gopal Sharma, Ross Adkin, Frank Jack Daniel, Andrew Marshall and Christophe Van Der Perre in Kathmandu, Aman Shah and Clara Ferreira-Marques in Mumbai, Aditya Kalra, Douglas Busvine and Aditi Shah in New Delhi, and Jane Wardell in Sydney.

About 100 bodies found in Nepal trekking village

     

 Nepali police and local volunteers found the bodies of about 100 trekkers and villagers buried in an avalanche set off by last month's devastating earthquake and were digging through snow and ice for signs of dozens more missing, officials said on Monday.

The government began asking foreign teams to wrap up search and rescue operations, as hope of finding people alive in the rubble receded.

"They can leave. If they are also specialists in clearing the rubble, they can stay," Rameshwor Dangal, an official at Nepal's home ministry, told Reuters on Monday.

The trekkers' bodies were recovered on Saturday and Sunday at the Langtang village, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of Kathmandu, which is on a trekking route popular with Westerners. The entire village, which includes 55 guesthouses for trekkers, was wiped out by the avalanche, officials said.

"Local volunteers and police personnel are digging through six-feet (deep) snow with shovels looking for more bodies," said

Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district officer in the area where Langtang is located.

The dead include at least seven foreigners but only two had been identified, he said.

It was not clear how many people were in Langtang at the time of the avalanche but other officials said about 120 more people could be buried under the snow.

"We had not been able to reach the area earlier because of rains and cloudy weather," Uddhav Bhattarai, the district's senior bureaucrat, said by telephone on Sunday.

The April 25 earthquake has killed 7,366 people and wounded nearly 14,500, Nepal's government said. The disaster has prompted an international relief and rescue effort.

The chief of India's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), which was among the first foreign organisations to arrive after the quake, said it had been asked by the Nepalese government to conclude its search and rescue operation.

"All the search and rescue teams, not the relief (teams) ... have been asked to return," NDRF Director General O.P. Singh told Indian television. "We will see how best it can be done."

At least 18 of the trekker deaths were on Mount Everest, where avalanches hit the slopes of the world's highest peak. The government said on Monday that it had not closed the mountain to climbers, though the route up to the peak was damaged.

"Climbers at base camp don't think the route will be fixed anytime soon," said Tulsi Prasad Gautam, a senior official at Nepal's tourism department. "It's up to the climbers and the organisers who are at base camp to take a decision: we are not asking them to do one thing or another."

Climbers pay $11,000 each to climb Everest, and 357 were registered for this climbing season. Last year, the government extended permits when teams abandoned their expeditions after an avalanche killed 16 Sherpa mountain guides.

MIRACULOUS SURVIVORS

In other parts of the Himalayan nation, three people were pulled alive from the rubble of their home on Sunday, eight days after the earthquake, while several media outlets reported that a 101-year-old man was found alive in the rubble on Saturday.

U.S. military aircraft and personnel arrived in Nepal on Sunday and were due to begin helping ferry relief supplies to stricken areas outside the capital, a U.S. Marines spokeswoman said.

The deployment is expected to ease the piling up of relief material at Kathmandu airport, Nepal's only major airport.

"We are still having problems getting things to people," said Orla Fagan, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

On Sunday, the government restricted the landing of large cargo aircraft at the airport to limit damage to the stressed runway, said a U.N. official who declined to be named.

The United Nations has said 8 million of Nepal's 28 million people were affected by the quake, with at least 2 million needing tents, water, food and medicines over the next three months.

More than half a million children are being vaccinated to prevent measles outbreaks, the UNICEF said in a statement on Monday. Around 1.7 million children remain in urgent need of humanitarian aid in the worst-hit areas, the statement added.

Corrected - Quake-hit Nepalis need information, not just food and water

   

 There is probably no other place in the world right now where information - from the fate of your family members to where to get food and water - is more desperately needed than in the Nepal, devastated by a powerful earthquake six days ago.

The 7.8 magnitude quake brought down thousands of buildings in the densely-populated Kathmandu Valley, which includes the capital, severely damaged telecommunications, tore apart roads and snapped bridges.

As the death toll passes 6,000, many of the estimated eight million people affected are living out in the open - unable find out if their families in rural areas are alive or dead.

Those in the remote mud-and-brick Himalayan villages remain stranded, possibly injured, amidst the ruins of their homes - awaiting rescue and relief.

Survival in a crisis is often based on the person's ability to connect and share information - to call for help and find comfort from others facing the same challenges, say experts in disaster communication.

As relief materials such dry food rations, blankets and tarpaulin sheets flood into Nepal, disaster specialists stress that information as a form of aid must not be overlooked.

"People affected by disasters need information just like disaster responders do - because it is what they need to make good decisions, protect themselves and their family and source the assistance they need," said Imogen Wall, an independent disaster expert specialising in communications.

INTERNET SAVES THE DAY

According to 2014 data from the Nepal Telecom Authority, 86 percent of the country's 28 million population have a mobile phone, with almost 30 percent able to access the internet.

Thousands in urban areas with intermittent access to the internet are charging phones from generators, and taken to social media sites to reassure loved ones they are safe.

‏"That scary earthquake shaked our nepal for a 2 minutes!!! And I am safe here but many people more than 100 are injured," tweeted @sunilkc9999 from the district of Pokhara after the earthquake struck close to noon on Saturday.

Many have also been using tools like Google's Person Finder and Facebook's Safety Check to trace missing friends and family.

Others have been using the web to call for aid.

"INFANT SUPPLIES NEEDED. Nepal Children's Organization requires lactogen, diapers, sanitation pads, food, water, and children's clothes," tweeted Chiranjibi Bhandari, a charity worker, from Kathmandu.

And now as rescue teams, aid workers and journalists venture out of the capital to areas closer to the epicentre, they are sharing powerful images and stories of communities on the brink.

Freelance photographer Prashanth Vishwanathan with ActionAid UK posted a picture on Facebook on Thursday of an elderly woman sitting amongst the debris of a cowshed, caressing the head of her dying cow as it lay buried under a mound of mud and straw.

"She (the cow) used to give my household 7 litres of milk. She was our sustenance," the picture caption quotes 72-year-old Sundaya Tamang of Phalame village in Khabre district as saying.

Network providers across the world are coming together to ease communications after the impoverished country's worst earthquake in more than 80 years, offering free or discounted rates on calls to Nepal.

Telecoms firms in India such as Airtel, Aircel and Vodafone, have slashed call charges to Nepal. While in the United States, network providers such as T-Mobile and Verizon have offered free calls and texts to Nepal. Skype and Viber are also allowing users make free calls in and out of the country.

"We want to help provide people with alternative methods of communication to reach friends and family in the region during this difficult time," said a statement from Skype.

"NEWS YOU CAN USE"

But for others without phones or internet access more traditional forms of communication such as radio are a lifeline, providing them with information on how to protect themselves and where to go for assistance.

Without such information, say experts, people often panic and false rumours can take hold, exacerbating the emergency.

BBC Media Action, for example, has been broadcasting disaster-related information through its Nepali Service and more than 260 local radio station partners.

Jackie Dalton, a senior producer and trainer at BBC Media Action said the media is key for reaching out to survivors, but journalists are often too busy reporting on the problems such as the death toll and devastation, rather than the solutions.

"People are hungry for information and need to be able to have information which can help them. We started training journalists in Nepal three years ago ... as a quake of this magnitude had been predicted," said Dalton.

"When the earthquake happened, within four hours the BBC Nepali Service was sending out information, and many of the national Nepali radio stations were doing the same."

The messages broadcast include what to do to stay safe during aftershocks and information on how to avoid sickness and disease by washing hands and filtering and boiling water.

They also give out first aid information, hotlines numbers to trace the missing and advice such as encouraging people to use text, rather than call to avoid congestion on the networks.

The media can also help to dispel rumours and misinformation common after a calamity.

In the hours after Saturday's earthquake, for example, there were rumours that even bigger quake of magnitude 9 was going to strike at a certain time, creating widespread panic. Radio stations quickly broadcast the information was false and that it was impossible to predict the timing of a quake.

Organisations such as InterNews are also deploying on the ground to coordinate information flows between communities, aid agencies and the media. Their staff act as intermediaries during disasters where they publish a daily "news you can use" bulletin in local languages for media to disseminate.

Groups such as the Communicating with Disaster-Affected Communities Network post practical information on everything from how to dispose of bodies safely to spotting the symptoms of cholera and the dangers of children playing in rubble.

But challenges remain, say disaster specialists, such as generating funds for this often invisible form of aid - not as tangible as food or tents and not as attractive to donors.

Another challenge, they say, is ensuring the communication a two-way process, where survivors are able to share their needs to ensure they can recover as quickly as possible.