[A day after Nepal’s worst
earthquake in 80 years, the official death toll had risen to more than 3,800,
and humanitarian aid was starting to flow to the capital. Katmandu’s airport
had been so overloaded by aid and passenger planes that incoming flights sat
for hours on the runway. Nepali expatriates were flying in, desperate to track
down family members, and setting off down the airport access road on foot,
rolling suitcases behind them.]
By Thomas Fuller and Ellen Barry
 |
| Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters |
SAURPANI, Nepal — Five hours by car from
Katmandu, then by foot for several miles past the spot where the road is
blocked by boulders and mud, people from the villages near the epicenter of Nepal’s
powerful earthquake are burying their dead, despairing of help arriving anytime
soon.
On Monday afternoon,
Parbati Dhakal and several dozen of her neighbors walked two hours down a
jungle path, carrying 11 bodies attached to bamboo poles. They stopped at a
riverbank where they lowered the dead into holes.
One of the villagers
pointed to the people gathered there and identified them, one by one: “Father
just buried; mother just buried; sister just buried.”
Back in Saurpani, an
ethnic Gurkha village at the epicenter of Saturday’s quake, Ms. Dhakal said,
“we have no shelter, no food and all the bodies are scattered around.”
A day after Nepal’s worst
earthquake in 80 years, the official death toll had risen to more than 3,800,
and humanitarian aid was starting to flow to the capital. Katmandu’s airport
had been so overloaded by aid and passenger planes that incoming flights sat
for hours on the runway. Nepali expatriates were flying in, desperate to track
down family members, and setting off down the airport access road on foot,
rolling suitcases behind them.
But outside the capital,
many of the worst-hit villages in the ridges around Katmandu remain a black
hole, surrounded by landslides that make them inaccessible even to the
country’s armed forces. Nepali authorities on Monday began airdropping packages
of tarpaulins, dry food and medicine into mountain villages, but an attempt to
land helicopters was abandoned, said Brigadier General Jagadish Chandra
Pokharel, an army spokesman.
The government is only
gradually getting a grasp of the destruction in these isolated places. It is
nearly impossible to identify which villages are most in need, and how many may
be dead or injured, said Jeffrey Shannon, director of programs for Mercy Corps
in Nepal.
“Right now, what we’re
hearing from everybody, including our own staff, is that we don’t know,” he
said. “As people start to travel these roads, to reach these communities, you
run into landslides. They’re simply inaccessible, the ones that need the most
help.”
The chief bureaucrat in
Gorkha district, Uddhav Timilsina, said rescue crews were unable even to
distribute relief, because they are confronting as many as eight to 10
landslides between one village and its nearest neighbor. He said 250 deaths had
been reported so far, but that it would take more time to get an accurate
count.
“Phone lines are down,
electricity is out, roads are blocked, so what can we do?” he said.
In interviews, residents
of hard-hit villages said their plight had not been in the foreground during
the early days of the crisis. Prakash Dhakal, a native of the village of
Saurpani, was in Katmandu when the earthquake struck, and visited a government
office on Sunday to plead with an official to send help.
“I asked them to send 25
young people to help bury our dead and search for the injured,” Mr. Dhakal
said. “They told me, ‘We can’t even rescue the injured in Katmandu. How do you
expect us to do anything for you now?’ ”
Around 90 percent of
Nepal’s troops, which number 90,000, have been mobilized for disaster relief
since Sunday, according to Gen. Pokharel. Most of that force has been
concentrated in Katmandu, though, and the army had only 12 operational
helicopters available at the time of the disaster. India has since donated six
more.
Some 650 injured have
been evacuated from villages to Katmandu, he said. He added that most of the
injured had been trapped in building collapses, and suffered head injuries and
broken limbs.
“We are trying to use our
aviation assets so we would recover them alive,” he said.
In the past, Nepal’s
government has made some attempt to consolidate thousands of tiny villages that
dot its mountain ridges, some of them more than a day’s hike from the nearest
road.
But though the road
system has expanded rapidly, attempts to attract mountain villagers to cities
and towns where they could receive government services have mostly failed, Mr.
Shannon said, perhaps because they lack the money to buy land elsewhere.
The upshot, he said, is a
population so cut off from the central government that most do not have Nepali
citizenship cards.
“All these people, they
are just invisible,” he said.
The residents of
Saurpani, as they made their way down to the banks of the Daraudi River with
the bodies of their relatives, described a landscape of destruction. There had
been 1,300 houses in Saurpani, but one resident, Shankar Thapa, said, “all the
houses collapsed.”
Villagers said luck
seemed to determine who lived and who died. Nar Bahadur Nepali, a 37-year-old
farmer, said most of the structures in his village had collapsed, including his
house.
“We survived because
there was a wedding in the village, and we were out in an open area,” he said.
At least 60 or 70 more people would have died had it not been for the wedding,
he said.
The earthquake that hit
on Saturday, shortly before noon, had a magnitude of 7.8, and early reports
suggest that those villages that were damaged were nearly obliterated.
Sumzah Lama, who is from
a village near the Tibetan border, was nursing her young daughter when the
quake hit. Her pelvis was fractured on both sides, and she said she believed
that her husband and three other daughters all died in the earthquake.
“The hills all came
down,” she said, from a hospital bed in Katmandu.
Dawa Janba, who lives
around two days’ walk from his home village of Langtang, in the same region,
said he looked down from a helicopter on Sunday as he was being medically
evacuated to Katmandu, and saw that “the whole valley has been destroyed.”
“The slides of snow and
rocks covered everything,” he said, adding that it seemed unlikely that more
than a few of the 600 residents of Langtang would have survived.
“There is nothing left to
go back to, everything is destroyed,” said his wife, Karchon Tamang.
“Everything was moving and smashed apart.”
Along the hills and
valleys at the epicenter on Monday, relatives were making their way back home
from Katmandu, where they had been working when the earthquake struck.
Dulbahadur Gurung, 27,
walked two hours from where the bus dropped him off and was planning to walk
another three hours to reach his village, Ranchok. Fifteen bodies had been
recovered there, so far. Before the quake there were around 150 houses.
“They told me there’s
nothing left,” he said.
Hari Kumar contributed
reporting from New Delhi, Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok and Christopher Buckley
from Katmandu. Ms. Barry reported from Katmandu.
