Quake in Nepal levels its capital
7.8 magnitude temblor kills more than 1,800
NEW DELHI — A powerful earthquake shook Nepal on Saturday, killing more than 1,800 people in and around its capital, Kathmandu, flattening sections of the city’s historic center and trapping dozens of sightseers in a 200-foot watchtower that came crashing down into a pile of bricks.
Officials in Nepal put the number of deaths at 1,805 today, nearly all of them in Kathmandu and the surrounding valley, with 4,718 injured, Reuters reported. The news agency said the home ministry has urged countries to send aid to help it cope with the aftermath.
The quake touched a vast swath of the subcontinent. It set off avalanches around Mount Everest, where at least 10 climbers were reported to have died. At least 34 deaths occurred in northern India. Buildings swayed in Tibet and Bangladesh.
The earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 7.8, struck shortly before noon, and residents of Kathmandu ran into the streets and other open spaces as buildings
fell, throwing up clouds of dust. Wide cracks opened on paved streets and in the walls of city buildings. Motorcycles tipped over on their sides and slid off the edge of a highway.
By midafternoon the U.S. Geological Survey had counted 12 aftershocks, one of which measured at a magnitude of 6.6.
Seismologists have expected a major earthquake in western Nepal, where there is pent-up pressure from the grinding between tectonic plates — the northern Eurasia plate and the upthrusting Indian plate. Still, witnesses described a chaotic rescue effort during the first hours after the quake, as emergency workers and volunteers grabbed tools and bulldozers from construction sites, and dug with hacksaws, mangled rebar, and their hands.
Though many have worried about the stability of the concrete high-rises that have been hastily erected in Kathmandu, the most terrible damage Saturday was to the oldest part of the city, which is studded with temples and palaces made of wood and unmortared brick.
Four of the area’s seven UNESCO World Heritage sites were severely damaged in the earthquake: Bhaktapur Durbar Square, a temple complex built in the shape of a conch shell; Patan Durbar Square, which dates to the third century; Basantapur Durbar Square, which was the residence of Nepal’s royal family until the 19th century; and the Boudhanath Stupa, one of the oldest Buddhist monuments in the Himalayas.
For many, the most breathtaking architectural loss was the nine-story Dharahara Tower, which was built in 1832 on the orders of the queen. The tower had recently reopened to the public, and visitors could ascend a narrow spiral staircase to a viewing platform around 200 feet above the city.
The walls were brick, around 1½ feet thick, and when the earthquake struck they came crashing down.
Police on Saturday said they had pulled around 60 bodies from the rubble of the tower. Kashish Das Shrestha, a photographer and writer, spent much of the day in the old city, but said he still had trouble grasping that the tower was gone.
“I was here yesterday, I was here the day before yesterday and it was there,” he said. “Today it’s just gone. Last night, from my terrace, I was looking at the tower. And today I was at the tower — and there is no tower.”
For years, people have worried about an earthquake of this magnitude in western Nepal, which had its last massively destructive event more than 100 years ago. Many feared that an immense death toll would result, in part because in recent years construction has been largely unregulated, said Ganesh Bhattari, a Nepalese expert on earthquakes now living in Denmark.
He said the government had made some improvements in making some buildings more robust and reinforcing vulnerable ones, but many larger buildings, like hospitals and oldage homes, remained extremely vulnerable.
“There is a little bit of improvement,” he said. “But it is really difficult for people to implement the rules and the regulations.”
Saturday’s earthquake struck when schools were not in session, which may have reduced the death toll. And the building collapses in Kathmandu appeared largely confined to brick structures in the city’s historic area, rather than concrete high-rise buildings. But there was not yet a full picture of the damage to villages on the mountain ridges around Kathmandu, where families live in houses made of mud and thatch.
As night fell, aftershocks were still hitting the area.
Toward evening, hospitals were trying to accommodate a huge influx of patients, some of them with amputated limbs, and were running short of supplies like bandages and trauma kits, said Jamie McGoldrick, resident coordinator with the U.N. Development Program in Nepal. Water supplies, a problem under normal circumstances in this fastgrowing city, will almost certainly run short in the coming days, he said. Search and rescue personnel will also face the challenge of reaching villages nearer the earthquake’s epicenter, where damage may be catastrophic.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. ambassador to Nepal, Peter Bodde, had issued a disaster declaration that would allow $1 million in humanitarian assistance to be available immediately. A disaster response team and an urban search and rescue team from the U.S. Agency for International Development would also be deployed, he said in a statement,
China and India, which jockey for influence in this region, have each pledged to step in with disaster assistance.
The earthquake set off avalanches on Mount Everest, where several hundred trekkers were attempting an ascent, according to climbers there. Alex Gavan, a hiker at base camp, called it a “huge disaster” on Twitter and described “running for life from my tent.”
Dan Fredinburg, a Google executive who described himself as an adventurer, was among the dead climbers, Google confirmed. Lawrence You, the company’s director of privacy, posted online that Mr. Fredinburg was with three other Google employees hiking Mount Everest. The other three, he added, are safe. Mr. Fredinburg was product manager and the head of privacy at Google X.
Historically, the region has been the site of the largest earthquakes in the Himalayas. A 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and a 1905 earthquake in Kangra, India, resulted in a death toll of more than 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.