Hopes fade for survivors as quake toll soars past 4,000
RELIEF AGENCIES WARN OF WATER-BORNE DISEASES AS MILLIONS CAMP OUTDOORS
H opes of finding survivors trapped under rubble began to fade two days after Nepal’s worst earthquake in decades, even as helicopters rescued 180 climbers trapped on Mount Everest.
Governments from around the globe rushed to aid one of Asia’s poorest economies following a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Saturday that killed more than 4,100 people. International relief agencies warned of water-borne diseases as millions of residents camped outdoors.
“The priority is to find people who are trapped and to search for survivors,” Colonel Naresh Subba, director of disaster management in Nepal’s army, said in Kathmandu yesterday.
Nepalese officials scrambled to get aid from the main airport to people left homeless and hungry by the devastating earthquake, while thousands tired of waiting fled the capital for the surrounding plains.
A senior interior ministry official said the toll could reach as much as 5,000, in the worst such disaster in Nepal since 1934, when 8,500 people were killed.
Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport was hobbled by many employees not showing up for work, people trying to get out, and a series of aftershocks which forced it to close several times since the quake. Priority at the damaged airport was given to aid flights carrying either doctors or search teams.
Government officials said they needed more supplies of food, medicines, specialised rescue services and body bags.
“The morgues are getting totally full,” said Shankar Koirala, an official in the Prime Minister’s Office who is dealing with the disposal of bodies.
Families lit funeral pyres for the dead in towns and across the countryside.
At least 38 Indian cities lie in high-risk seismic zones and nearly 60 per cent of the subcontinental landmass is vulnerable to earthquakes. Barring rare exceptions, such as the Delhi Metro, India’s hastily-built cities are open to great damage from earthquakes.
The earthquake that devastated Nepal on Saturday and jolted northern India, damaging buildings as far apart as Agra and Siliguri, was expected by geologists, who have warned of more Himalayan earthquakes caused by the growing pressures of the subcontinent grinding into the Asian mainland.
Very few buildings in India meet the standards prescribed in “Indian Standards Criteria for Earthquake Resistant Design” — first published by the Bureau of Indian Standards in 1962, the latest revision being in 2005. These are not enforced, so almost no one knows such earthquake-resistant standards and guidelines for homeowners exist.
The Delhi Metro is one of the few Indian structures built to withstand a quake. Many of the houses built in Bhuj after the Gujarat quake of 2001 are now earthquake-resistant. The rare building and high-rise may be designed for quakes.
But nothing has changed since 1993, when a relatively milder earthquake of magnitude 6.4 in Maharashtra’s Latur district killed nearly 10,000 people in what was considered a non-seismic zone.
Most died because shoddily constructed houses collapsed at the first major shake, as they did in Gujarat eight years later.
The government of India today lists 38 cities in moderate to high-risk seismic zones. “Typically, the majority of the constructions in these cities are not earthquake-resistant,” notes a 2006 report written by the United Nations for the ministry of home affairs. “Therefore in the event of an earthquake, one of these cities would become a major disaster.”
The earth’s landmasses ride like gigantic rafts on “plates”, or sections of the earth’s outermost layer, the crust. These plates frequently slip and slide, causing earthquakes. We don’t feel the small ones. The big ones, literally, shake us up.
The Himalayas and north India are on particularly shaky ground. Sometime in the geological past, before humans, India broke off from an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana, a name still used for what is now Chhattisgarh.
The Indian plate skewed north, displaced an ancient sea, travelled more than 2,000km — the fastest a plate has ever moved — and slammed into the Eurasian plate, creating the Himalayas.
2005 temblor
India still grinds northeast into Asia at roughly 5cm every year. The last significant — but not geologically significant — quake in this area was the 2005 temblor in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which sits directly atop the clashing Indian and Eurasian plates. Around 80,000 people died.
About 60 per cent of India is vulnerable to earthquakes caused by the great, northward grind of the Indian subcontinental landmass.
The only serious earthquake that modern India remembers is the temblor that killed about 20,000 in Gujarat in 2001.