Desperate aid efforts hampered by new mudslide in remote mountains
HELICOPTERS crisscrossed the mountains above a remote district yesterday near the epicentre of the weekend earthquake, as officials said 250 villagers were feared missing in a new mudslide.
Two helicopters brought in eight women from Ranachour village, two of them clutching babies and a third heavily pregnant.
“There are many more injured people in my village,” said Sangita Shrestha, who was pregnant and visibly downcast as she got off the helicopter. She was quickly surrounded by Nepalese soldiers and policemen and ushered into a waiting van to be taken to a hospital.
The little town of Gorkha, the district’s administrative and trading centre, is being used as a staging post to get rescuers and supplies to those remote communities after Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake.
Near the quake’s epicentre, hundreds of people were feared missing after a mudslide and avalanche yesterday, district official Gautam Rimal said.
Heavy snow had been falling near the village, Ghodatabela, and the ground may have been loosened by the quake.
The village, about a 12-hour walk from the nearest town, is along a popular trekking route, but it was not clear if the missing included trekkers. In Gorkha, some women who came off the helicopters yesterday were grimacing and crying in pain and unable to walk or speak, in agony three days after being injured in the quake.
Sita Karki winced when soldiers lifted her. Her broken and swollen legs had been tied together with crude wisps of hay twisted into a makeshift splint.
“When the earthquake hit, a wall fell on me and knocked me down,” she said. “My legs are broken.”
After an hour of dark clouds gathering, the wind picked up in Gorkha and sheets of rain began to pour down.
Aid workers who had reached the edges of the epicentre described entire villages reduced to rubble.
“In some villages, about 90 per cent of the houses have collapsed. They’re just flattened,” said Rebecca Mcateer, an American doctor who rushed to the area to help casualties from the distant hospital where she works.