Dramatic rescue from rubble days after quake
‘It’s hard to believe people are still alive’
KATHMANDU, NEPAL • The 15-year-old boy had been buried alive under the rubble of this quake-stricken capital for five days, listening to bulldozers clearing mountains of debris, fearful the incessant aftershocks might finally collapse the darkened crevice where he was trapped.
And then, “all of a sudden I saw light,” Pempa Tamang said, recounting the moment Thursday he was pulled from a hole at the bottom of what was once a seven-storey building in Kathmandu.
Tamang did not know whether he was alive or dead. “I thought I was hallucinating,” he said.
The improbable rescue was an uplifting moment in Nepal, which has been overwhelmed by death and destruction since the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Saturday. By late Thursday, the government said the toll from the tremor, the most powerful recorded here since 1934, had risen to 6,130 dead and 13,827 injured.
After night fell, police reported another dramatic rescue: A woman in her 20s, Krishna Devi Khadka, was pulled from a building in the same neighbourhood as Tamang, near Kathmandu’s main bus terminal. “Life has become a struggle to survive. It gives us hope,” said Hans Raj Joshi, who watched Tamang’s rescue.
“We thought they were only bringing out the dead. It’s hard to believe people are still alive.”
When Tamang was finally extricated, rescue workers inserted an IV in his arm, propped him onto a yellow plastic stretcher — the same kind that has helped convey countless dead — and carried him through the ruins on their shoulders as if he was a newly crowned king.
Lines of police stood on both sides, keeping back mobs of bystanders and journalists. A dazed Tamang, wearing a dark shirt with the New York Yankees logo, blinked at the bright sky.
When the procession entered the main road outside, there was a sound Kathmandu hadn’t heard in days: the jubilant cheers of thousands of ecstatic onlookers.
Nepal, however, is far from normal. More than 70 aftershocks have been recorded in the past five days, according to J.L. Gautam, the director of seismology at the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi.
Shortages of food and water and worry over the fate of relatives have triggered an exodus from the capital, prompting thousands to board buses provided by the government to travel to their rural hometowns.
Tamang’s dark hair was dishevelled, and he looked weak and tired but otherwise fine as he recounted his story in an Israeli field hospital.
When Saturday’s quake began at 11:56 a.m., Tamang said he was having lunch with a friend in the hotel where he worked. As he ran down stairs, they shook. He saw walls cracking, ceilings caving in.
He was in the basement when “suddenly the building fell down. I thought I was about to die,” he told reporters. Tamang fainted, and when he regained consciousness, he could see little but darkness.
He was buried face down in a tiny crevice deep in the rubble. He was terrified.
For days, Tamang survived on two cans of ghee, or clarified butter. He rested his head
We thought they were only bringing out dead
on chunks of concrete and broken piece of corrugated aluminum roof.
It took hours to carefully clear the way for Tamang to be lifted out. Members of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team brought in equipment to help, and lowered a pole-mounted rotatable camera into the hole, said one of the team’s members, Andrew Olvera.
Looking at a pair of huge, ripped concrete floors hanging precariously like curtains on the side of the destroyed building, just above the rescue site, Olvera said the operation was dangerous. But, “it’s risk versus gain. To save a human life, we’ ll risk almost anything.”