[There seems almost no
chance that anyone alive is still trapped amid the rubble from the quake, which
struck just before noon on April 25. On Sunday, though, three survivors were
found in the Sindhupalchok district, an especially hard hit and largely rural
area north of Kathmandu. The official death toll now exceeds 7,300.]
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Japanese rescue workers
removed debris from a collapsed building on Saturday in
Sankhu, Nepal. Credit David Ramos/Getty
Images
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KATHMANDU, Nepal — The government of Nepal is
asking foreign search-and-rescue teams to leave now that the likelihood of
finding survivors buried by last month’s
earthquake has largely passed, and a top Nepali tourism
official said Monday that no more climbers were likely to ascend Mount Everest
this season.
“We have already asked
them to go home,” Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, a Home Ministry spokesman, said on
Monday of the foreign rescue teams, adding that roughly half the 4,000 rescuers
had already left. “I think all the rescuers will go to their respective
countries by Friday.”
Some of the rescuers,
however, said they had no intention of leaving immediately.
The leader of a large
Spanish team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been
authorized by his embassy to speak publicly, said Nepal’s
government would soon divide Kathmandu, the capital, into sectors so that
various teams would have responsibility for specific parts of the city. In the
early days of the rescue effort, teams often ended up searching the same sites
because of a lack of coordination.
Asked whom his team could
still rescue, the leader responded: “Whoever is still alive. We don’t yet know
if anyone is still in there.”
“We have the technology
for surveying under the rubble; we have dogs that sniff people out,” the team
leader said. “And we have other kinds of techniques.”
There seems almost no
chance that anyone alive is still trapped amid the rubble from the quake, which
struck just before noon on April 25. On Sunday, though, three survivors were
found in the Sindhupalchok district, an especially hard hit and largely rural
area north of Kathmandu. The official death toll now exceeds 7,300.
Dr. Ian Norton, head of
the World
Health Organization’s program of foreign medical teams, praised the
government’s announcement, which he said would free up airport facilities and
other resources.
“More is not better at
this point,” Dr. Norton said. “If you’re not contributing, you need to make way
for those who are.”
Dr. Norton said that the
thousands of rescuers, who often work as firefighters in their home countries,
had saved a total of 16 people in the aftermath of the quake, and that about 50
foreign medical teams comprising nearly 10,000 people had saved hundreds of
lives and even more limbs. After the Haiti
earthquake in 2010, nearly 2,000 rescuers saved 13 people, but
nearly 30,000 Haitians died because of a lack of
proper medical care, Dr. Norton said.
“I’m not saying rescue
teams are bad, but there needs to be a balance,” Dr. Norton said. “This
announcement by the Nepali government is completely appropriate.”
Mr. Dhakal explained that
many of the rescue teams had refused to take part in the task of recovering
dead bodies from the still-towering piles of rubble in some parts of Kathmandu,
“so their relevance is now over.”
Minendra Rijal, the
minister for information and communication, said, “We do not need ones who are
not needed for us, but we will keep those who are essential.”
Also Monday, a group of
experienced Sherpas told the government that the Sherpa community had neither
the time nor the inclination to do the necessary repairs before bad weather,
which usually arrives in the third week of May, made climbing impossible.
Ang Dorjee Sherpa, chairman
of the Sagarmatha
Pollution Control Committee, which is responsible for climbing-route
maintenance, said in a telephone interview that an inspection he and others had
completed Sunday found that the route through the Khumbu Icefall, which
collapsed last year as well, was simply gone.
“We had to work almost
for one month to fix the route and rope when it collapsed after last year’s
avalanche,” he said. “If we started today, it would take at least 12 to 15 days
to rebuild the route and refix the ropes.”
The work would be
dangerous because of the instability of the icefall, and with only five
climbers at the base camp willing to ascend, there was no point in undergoing
the task, he said.
“Since the whole country
is suffering from a devastating natural disaster, why should we encourage them
to bear yet another risk?” Mr. Sherpa asked, referring to mountaineers.
Tulsi Prasad Gautam, the
head of Nepal’s tourism department, which oversees mountaineering, said in an
interview that the Sherpa report most likely spelled the end of this year’s
climbing season.
“We’ve been told that
many climbers have already left base camp and that it’s not easy to fix the
route and rope for climbing within the short window of time we have left,” the
tourism official said.
This will be the second
consecutive year that the Everest climbing season has been truncated because of
a deadly event. Last year, about 30 climbers were crossing a notorious area
known by some local residents as the Golden Gate because of the shape of its
ice formations when a huge chunk of ice cascaded down the mountain’s south side
around 6:30 a.m. and engulfed them, killing 16 Sherpas.
That avalanche,
and the outrage among the Sherpas over their pay and safety conditions, forced
the cancellation of the climbing season, a crucial part of Nepal’s tourism
industry. It was the deadliest day in Everest history until the earthquake this
year, which caused a wall of boulders, rocks,
ice and debris to pulverize the mountaineering base camp,
killing 18 people, including four Americans.
Bhadra Sharma contributed
reporting.
