[By Wednesday, four days after a 7.8 magnitude
earthquake rocked this impoverished country, the death toll had risen above
5,200, and recovery and relief efforts had become a long, hard slog. Newspapers
made much of the story of Rishi Khanal, 27, who was rescued on Tuesday after
being trapped for around 80 hours in the debris of a hotel where he had been
eating lunch.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
|
Residents
retrieved belongings from homes in Bhaktapur, Nepal, where search-and-rescue
teams
from the United States and elsewhere were told Wednesday that there was no one
left
to save. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
|
BHAKTAPUR, Nepal — A team of the United
States’ most renowned search-and-rescue workers drove into the shattered city
of Bhaktapur on Wednesday, having traveled toNepal from
Fairfax County, Va.
They brought with them sniffer dogs trained to
detect live bodies, acoustic life detectors designed to pick up noises from
entombed victims, and engineers capable of cutting through six-inch walls of
reinforced concrete. Their goal was straightforward, said Capt. Mike Davis, the
team’s manager.
“We are going out there to look for human
life,” he said.
The members of the disaster assistance
response team, from the United States Agency for International Development,
drew stares, with their buzz cuts and neon hard hats, as they mounted the hill
into the 15th-century city. But the next three hours brought a slow deflation,
as one resident after another told them there was no one to save. The ruined
houses were mashed wads of brick and mud and wood, leaving no space that could
allow a trapped person to survive.
One tip seemed promising — a collapsed
five-story concrete building — but a Pakistani military team was already
scouring it.
A white-haired man approached Captain. Davis,
bowed his head and joined his hands together in prayer, pointing to the place
where his 26-year-old son, Amin Sainju, was buried when his house collapsed.
But Amin was presumed dead, and Captain Davis explained, through a translator,
that the team was tasked with finding the living.
“We could be at the end of that window,” he
explained in an interview. “But we have got to try.”
By Wednesday, four days after a 7.8 magnitude
earthquake rocked this impoverished country, the death toll had risen above
5,200, and recovery and relief efforts had become a long, hard slog. Newspapers
made much of the story of Rishi Khanal, 27, who was rescued on Tuesday after
being trapped for around 80 hours in the debris of a hotel where he had been
eating lunch.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr.
Khanal described drinking his own urine for sustenance and banging with his
hands on the rubble around him until he caught the notice of a French-led
rescue team.
In Bhaktapur, a city about seven miles from
Katmandu, though, people’s entreaties had a numbing sameness. They wanted
tarpaulins, food and water. And they wanted help recovering the dead.
Lt. Col. A. R. Rana, a Nepali army officer,
named four countries that had sent search teams into the city in the last
several days. He said no one had been found alive in the city since Monday, and
international teams should take on more practical tasks.
“They are all doing the same thing,” he said.
“They are sending people who want to get live bodies.”
With tens of thousands of people living in
tents in parks and fairgrounds, frustration is building. Several hundred people
blocked traffic Wednesday in Katmandu, the capital, complaining that they had
not received any aid. Reuters reported that a group of around 200 villagers in
Sangachowk, about a three hours’ drive from Katmandu, used tires to block a
highway so they could stop trucks filled with food and relief materials they
felt they needed.
In Bhaktapur, which was deserted just two days
ago, families had returned in great numbers on Wednesday, and some people were
balanced precariously on three-story piles of bricks, trying to extract and
dust off family photos.
Vikas Jamban stood in a square with a few
friends, watching first a 20-person detachment of China’s Blue Sky Rescue team
and then Captain Davis’s crew. Mr. Jamban said that he had also seen Indian,
French and Polish crews pass through, and that he was counting on help from the
international aid that is flowing into the country.
“Up until four days we have nothing to eat, no
water, no electricity, and my house is broken,” he said. “The Nepali
government, I don’t know what they’re doing.”
John Tung, a structural engineer who travels
with Captain Davis’s team, was eyeballing the narrow pink-brick houses around
him, some of them hundreds of years old. Judging from the slant on the first
floor of the houses that remained standing, he said, around 30 percent were
unstable and could fall if there was another strong aftershock.
“We saw a bird sitting on the side of one
building,” said Blake Payne, a software engineer who serves as a technical
specialist for the team. “The bird took off, and a brick fell.”
Nearly three hours had passed since the team
had arrived, and Captain Davis was in a hurry to move on to a neighborhood
where there was a greater likelihood of finding survivors. He was still being
trailed, a little mournfully, by Radesham Sainju, the father who had hoped
someone would uncover the body of his son, but that would not happen; The
response teams follow guidelines set by the International Search and Rescue
Advisory Group, which confine them to rescuing the living until the country’s
government has declared the search over.
“If you tried to recover all the dead bodies,
you might leave live bodies to die,” said Bill Berger, the U.S.A.I.D. disaster
assistance response team leader in Nepal. “We only have so much bandwidth to
the search-and-rescue team, so they have to focus on getting live bodies.
That’s always got to be the priority.”
But that, Mr. Tung said, does not make it any
less frustrating to walk away from a place without having found any sign of
survivors. They had come so far.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a little hard to
handle.”
Nida Najar contributed reporting from New
Delhi.
