Rescue workers in Nepal yesterday began digging through the rubble of collapsed houses with their bare hands, searching for survivors after the country’s worst earthquake in eight years killed 157 people and shook buildings as far away as New Delhi.
The magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the Jajarkot District of Karnali Province in the west of the Himalayan nation at 11:47pm on Friday, the Nepalese National Earthquake Monitoring and Seismological Research Center said.
The German Research Centre for Geosciences measured it at 5.7 and the US Geological Survey at 5.6.
Photo: AFP
Officials fear the death toll could rise as first responders had reached the hilly area near the epicenter, about 500km west of the capital, Kathmandu, only early yesterday and began searching for survivors.
“The number of injured could be in the hundreds and the deaths could go up as well,” Jajarkot District official Harish Chandra Sharma said by telephone.
Although the quake’s magnitude was not severe, the damage and the death toll are high due to the poor quality of construction in the area and because it struck while people slept, officials said.
Rescue work was expected to be slow as emergency teams must first clear roads blocked by landslides in many places, they said, adding that helicopters and small planes have been asked to be ready to join the effort.
The quake is the deadliest since 2015 when about 9,000 people were killed in two earthquakes. Whole towns, centuries-old temples and other historic sites were reduced to rubble then, with more than 1 million houses destroyed, at a cost to the economy of US$6 billion.
Yesterday’s death toll included 105 people killed in Jajarkot and 52 in neighboring Rukum West District, Nepalese Ministry of Home Affairs Under-secretary for Disaster Preparedness and Response Rama Acharya said.
The epicenter was in the village of Ramidanda. The national seismological center said that 175 aftershocks were recorded in Jajarkot and six of them were of magnitude 4 or greater.
Three towns and three villages were known to be affected in Jajarkot, which has a population of 190,000 with villages scattered in remote hills, authorities said.
At least 85 people were injured in Rukum West and 55 in Jajarkot, an official in the prime minister’s office said.
“Many houses have collapsed, many others have developed cracks. Thousands of residents spent the entire night in cold, open grounds because they were too scared to go into the cracked houses as aftershocks struck,” Sharma said. “I have myself not been able to go in.”
Local TV channels showed rescuers digging through the rubble with their bare hands looking for survivors in the debris of collapsed houses. Injured people were shown being carried to a rescue helicopter to move them to hospitals.
Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal flew to the area early yesterday with a 16-member army medical team to oversee search, rescue and relief, his office said.
His office appealed to political parties, social workers and the public to donate funds to help arrange food, water, clothes and tents for the survivors.
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