Nepal rules out finding more quake survivors

None rescued alive since Thursday. Focus shifts on reaching out to survivors

Nepal ruled out the possibility on Saturday of finding more survivors buried in the rubble from a massive earthquake that killed more than 6,700 people and devastated vast swathes of one of Asia's poorest countries.

One week on from Nepal's deadliest quake in over 80 years, hopes of detecting more signs of life among the ruins of the capital Kathmandu had all but disappeared and the focus was shifting to reaching survivors in far-flung areas who have yet to receive relief supplies.

The UN children's fund UNICEF warned of a race against time to avert an outbreak of disease among the 1.7 million youngsters estimated to be living in the worst-hit areas, with monsoon rains just a few weeks away.

The 7.8-magnitude quake wreaked a trail of death and destruction when it erupted around midday last Saturday, reducing much of Kathmandu to rubble and even triggering a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.

“It has already been one week since the disaster,” home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal said.

“We are trying our best in rescue and relief work but now I don't think that there is any possibility of survivors under the rubble.”
As well as updating the death toll to 6,841, Dhakal put the number of injured at 14,023.

While multiple teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble, no one has been pulled alive since Thursday evening.

More than 100 people were also killed in neighbouring India and China.

The exact scale of the disaster was still to emerge, with the mountainous terrain in the vast Himalayan nation complicating the relief effort.

The numbers of foreigners who have died was also unclear with around 1,000 EU citizens still unaccounted for in Nepal, according to diplomats.

The Europeans had mostly been climbing in the Everest region or trekking in the remote Langtang range in the Himalayas near the quake epicentre.

“They are missing but we don't know what their status is,” EU ambassador to Nepal Rensje Teerink told reporters, confirming that 12 EU citizens are known to have died so far.

Another EU official said on condition of anonymity that the majority were likely to be found safe, but given the difficulty of the terrain and poor communications, their whereabouts were currently unknown.

Rameshwor Dangal, joint secretary of Nepal's National Disaster Management Division, said many people were waiting to either receive emergency aid supplies or else be airlifted to safety.

“In many areas people are not getting relief and it is natural that they are unhappy about it,” he said.

“We estimate that there may still be around 1,000 people in Sindhupalchowk and Rasuwa areas who need to be rescued. This includes the injured and the stranded people, including the foreigners.”

The Nepalese government has acknowledged being overwhelmed but the UN’s humanitarian chief defended its performance.

“The scale and devastation wreaked by the earthquake and the aftershocks would have challenged any government,” Valerie Amos said on Friday.

UNICEF said the health and wellbeing of children affected by the disaster were “hanging in the balance” as so many had been left homeless, in deep shock and with no access to
basic care.

Foreign diplomats try to track the missing

The thousands of foreigners who were in Nepal when the earthquake struck have mostly been found, but hollow-eyed diplomats here still clutch lengthy lists of the names of those who remain unaccounted for, reports the New York Times.

Diplomats from all over the world descended on Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, in the days after the quake to try to find and rescue their citizens. While their tasks are less daunting than the struggles of Nepalis to recover from the tragedy, the diplomats still face major challenges. Visitors to Nepal and permanent residents from other countries do not have to register with their home countries, so most embassies have had to guess the number of their citizens in peril. Because a quake here has long been predicted, some spent years preparing.

The Irish government, for instance, had helped to sponsor St. Patrick’s Day gatherings for years at two Irish pubs in Kathmandu in hopes of getting a rough census of its citizens here, who number about 30. Other embassies relied on word-of-mouth estimates.

The US Embassy has tried to keep track of 2,000 to 3,000 citizens who are permanent residents, including the children of Nepalis living in the United States who had been sent back to be cared for by their grandparents. In addition, about 3,000 U.S. citizens were estimated to be visiting Nepal at the time of the quake, according to a US Embassy official here who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the days after the quake, the embassy received several thousand inquiries about people believed to be missing.