JHARIBAR/SINDHUPALCHOWK, Nepal, (Reuters) – People stranded in remote villages and towns across Nepal were still waiting for aid and relief to arrive yesterday, 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
