Race to reach UK student stranded by quake
A BRITISH woman has spent her fourth night stranded in a remote Nepalese valley in ‘desperate need of food and water’.
Relatives of Susannah Ross, 20, know exactly where she is but says so far nobody has come to her rescue.
The yoga student from Bath is among 15 trekkers who managed to send an SOS after surviving the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that is feared to have claimed as many as 10,000 lives.
Towns and villages across Nepal have been flattened and communication problems in the worst-affected areas have meant friends and families of the missing have been left in the dark.
Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said officials were now investigating reports a Briton was among the dead.
Last night Miss Ross’s mother Judy, 62, said: ‘The waiting has become unbearable – not to know whether she’s badly hurt or in pain and scared.’
Her sister Nina, 25, added: ‘They have sent the co- ordinates but said in the message that some are injured and they don’t have any food or water … They said they need a helicopter to get out. All the roads around them are ruined.’
Helicopters have rescued all 150 known climbers stranded on Everest after the avalanche triggered by Saturday’s earthquake. But other trekkers in the Himalayas, including Miss Ross in the Langtang valley, remained trapped. Miss Ross left home a month ago for a yoga retreat after working as a waitress and barmaid to save up for the trip. A friend at the pub where she worked said she had been ‘adventurous from a young age’.
Another Briton who had been trekking in the same area of Nepal told how she clung to a tree to cheat death.
Holly Cowie, 26, a lawyer from London travelling with French boyfriend Axel Haudiquet, 29, said yesterday: ‘It was just like the ground turned into a water bed. It was like being on a bouncy castle with someone else jumping.
‘Luckily my boyfriend twigged what was happening and we ran. A big stone fell next to us … There was a billowing brown cloud coming straight for us … We clung on to the tree and it hit us, everything was brown and then it went totally black. I thought I was going to be buried alive.’
Other survivors told of lucky escapes, including 28-year- old newlyweds Alex and Sam Chappatte, from London, who were among the last to be airlifted from Everest’s Camp 1 at 19,000ft.
They wrote on Twitter: ‘We are in base camp … searching for our stuff. It’s a bomb site.’ They added: ‘Starting to hear about the devastation in the region … Pleased we are no longer a distraction.’
Alex Staniforth, a 19-year- old climber on Everest, posted a picture of his destroyed tent, and said he thought he was ‘going to be buried’ when ice and rock ripped through his camp.
‘I couldn’t run due to huge crevasses surrounding me. I was blinded, thrown to my knees, suffocated … I thought this was it – I was going to be buried.’
He added: ‘Tragically three of our Nepali staff were killed at base camp … I am very lucky to be alive.’ The avalanche killed 18 people and injured 61, according to Nepal’s mountaineering department.
Many missing Britons have managed to get word to their families, but for some friends and relatives the agonising wait continued.
The parents of Matt Carapiet, 23, from Maidstone, Kent, left a message on Google People Finder, saying: ‘Hi Matts, hope you are safe and well, contact us as soon as you can. Mum and Dad x.’
Dozens of Britons slept on the floor of the British Embassy in Kathmandu last night as they waited for flights home, while others bedded down in hotel lobbies.
‘Have no food or water’