As hopes fade, Nepal requests foreign rescuers to leave

The government of Nepal is asking foreign search-and-rescue teams to leave now that the likelihood of finding survivors buried by last month’s earthquake has largely passed. The official death toll now exceeds 7,300.

Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, a Home Ministry spokesman, said on Monday roughly half the 4,000 rescuers had already left. “I think all the rescuers will go to their respective countries by Friday.”

There seems almost no chance that anyone alive is still trapped amid the rubble from the quake, which struck just before noon on April 25. On Sunday, though, three survivors were found in the Sindhupalchok district, an especially hard hit and largely rural area north of Kathmandu.

Dr. Ian Norton, head of the World Health Organization’s program of foreign medical teams, said that the thousands of rescuers, who often work as firefighters in their home countries, had saved a total of 16 people in the aftermath of the quake, and that about 50 foreign medical teams comprising nearly 10,000 people had saved hundreds of lives and even more limbs.

[The New York Times]

Obstacles to Nepal earthquake relief

There’s a lot of aid headed toward Nepal, but it’s not getting there as fast as people would like. The reason: There aren’t enough runways.

The country’s only international airport is Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. It’s tiny. It has just one runway. So it can’t accommodate all the planes flying in.

The single runway has been closed several times for earthquake repairs. Also, there are limited places for planes to park. On many days, pilots circled for hours waiting for another plane to take off because there’s no room to land.

This bottleneck has slowed the recovery effort. A terminal duty officer, who wouldn’t give his name because he’s not allowed to talk to the media, says the situation is bad: “It is a mess here. ”

That’s not the only obstacle to relief work. Some groups show up and don’t know what to do or where to go. Or how to get there.

“Even where there was no disaster here, it was just really difficult to get around,” says Lisa Rudolph, an American Red Cross worker who arrived from Washington, D.C. “Even within Kathmandu itself it can take an hour to get from one point to another. And so now with roads blocked [due to earthquake damage and] the airport congested, it’s going to be really difficult.”

[NPR]

Amongst the challenges of aid workers

Unni Krishnan spent hours on the tarmac in Delhi Sunday afternoon before he learned his flight would be cancelled because of a massive aftershock in Kathmandu. While the 49-year-old Canadian aid worker managed to catch a different flight to the earthquake-shattered capital of Nepal the following morning, several of his colleagues remain stranded at airports, waiting for a seat on a flight they hoped would be able to land.

One colleague’s plane touched down twice in Kathmandu before taking off again. “They need to find a balancing act between materials and people, because both are needed for the circumstances,” said Mr. Krishnan, who is Plan International’s head of disaster response and preparedness.

That backlog at the airport is one of many challenges for aid workers who are struggling to reach those most in need of help after a devastating earthquake shook the South Asian country on Saturday, killing more than 5,000 people. People in Nepal described chaotic scenes on Monday as thousands fled the capital and officials struggled to move supplies from the country’s main airport to those left homeless by the earthquake.

Ottawa has promised $5-million in aid to Nepal and says it will match donations from individual Canadians over a one-month period. The federal government also sent an assessment group from the military’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, along with a search-and-rescue team and medical personnel. And Canadian aid agencies are moving into action, sending humanitarian workers and supplies to the damaged country of 31 million.

Francois Audet, a professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal who has studied the international response to humanitarian disasters, said co-ordination among agencies and with local officials is always a challenge after a major event such as an earthquake. Those challenges can be amplified, he said, if aid organizations begin competing for donations and facing pressures to demonstrate that they are achieving results.

Stephen Cornish, executive director for Médecins sans frontières Canada (MSF), said some of the biggest challenges in co-ordinating aid typically arise in the weeks after a disaster occurs. That’s because the organizations that arrive first – and those already working in a country – are more experienced at working with others and tend to have better local contacts.

Several Canadian aid agencies said the situation has improved since the introduction of the “cluster” system after the 2004 tsunamis. That system groups aid organizations into specific “clusters” of humanitarian aid – such as shelter and health – to ensure that the assistance being provided is reaching those who need it, and different groups’ efforts aren’t overlapping.

[The Globe and Mail]

Nepal death toll over 5200, with monsoons approaching

The death toll from the devastating Nepali quake has risen to over 5200, and the United Nations said it has affected 8 million people across 39 districts, with a quarter of those in the worst affected areas. Some 70,000 houses were destroyed and another 530,000 homes damaged across the quake-affected districts.

Half a million tents are urgently needed for the huge number of people forced from their homes, a government minister said Wednesday, as rescue efforts continue in the stricken nation. The Nepali government has so far provided more than 4,700 tents and 22,000 tarpaulins to those in need of shelter. Aircraft loaded with tents are expected from India and Thailand in the next day, with a further 100,000 tents expected from Pakistan.

Heavy rain has intensified the hardships for the countless Nepalis who are sleeping out in the open because their homes were destroyed or they don’t feel safe inside buildings amid continuing aftershocks.

“We are staring down the barrel of the approaching monsoon across the subcontinent, and here in Nepal that typically lasts from May through to September,” Matt Darvas, an emergency communications officer for the humanitarian group World Vision, said. That can generally mean “heavy downpours every day — and extreme heat,” he added.

The US Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors earthquakes worldwide, reported that the Nepal earthquake measured at a magnitude of 7.8. However, the China Earthquakes Network Center (CENC), which hopes to provide a similar service, measured the same earthquake at a magnitude of 8.1.

A difference of 0.3 in the magnitude of the seismic activity may not seem like much, but the apparently small differences in magnitudes of earthquakes reported by different agencies around the world are, in real-life, huge. Because if we are to believe the Chinese data, the Nepal earthquake may have been twice in size than if we believe the US data.

Nepal quake death toll tops 4000

As the death toll from Nepal’s devastating earthquake climbed past 4,000, aid workers and officials in remote, shattered villages near the epicenter pleaded Monday for food, shelter and medicine. The small airport in the capital of Kathmandu was congested and chaotic, with some flights forced to turn back early in the day.

Buildings in parts of the city were reduced to rubble, and there were shortages of food, fuel, electricity and shelter. As bodies were recovered, relatives cremated the dead along the Bagmati River, and at least a dozen pyres burned late into the night.

Conditions were far worse in the countryside, with rescue workers still struggling to reach mountain villages two days after the earthquake. Some roads and trails to the Gorkha district, where the quake was centered, were blocked by landslides — but also by traffic jams that regularly clog the route north of Kathmandu.

“There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I’ve had reports of villages where 70 percent of the houses have been destroyed,” said Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha region.

World Vision aid worker Matt Darvas cited a “disturbing” report from the village of Singla, where up to 75 percent of the buildings may have collapsed and there has been no contact since Saturday night.

Jagdish Pokhrel, a clearly exhausted army spokesman, said nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army was involved in rescue operations. Rescue workers and medical teams from at least a dozen countries were helping police and army troops in Kathmandu and surrounding areas.

Nepal’s Home Ministry said the country’s death toll had risen to 4,010. Another 61 were killed in neighboring India, and China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported 25 dead in Tibet. At least 7,180 people were injured in the quake, police said. Tens of thousands are estimated to be left homeless.

The quake was the worst to hit the South Asian nation in more than 80 years. It was felt across parts of India, Bangladesh, China’s region of Tibet, and Pakistan.

[Yahoo News]

Minimum of 2500 deaths from Nepal earthquake

After a 7.9 earthquake that struck near Kathmandu, Nepal authorities said Sunday that at least 2,430 people in that country had died in Nepal alone, not including the 18 people that the Nepal Mountaineering Association says died in an earthquake-triggered avalanche on Mount Everest, plus another 61 people in India and a few in other neighboring countries.

• Powerful aftershocks today between Kathmandu and Everest unleashed more avalanches in the Himalayas and caused panic in the capital, where hospital workers stretchered patients out into the street as it was too dangerous treat them indoors.
• At least 18 people believed to have been killed on Everest, and 61 injured, by an avalanche which left mountaineers calling for helicopter assistance to evacuate the most badly wounded.
• The quakes caused widespread damage to Nepal’s infrastructure which has further hampered search and rescue operations. Many historic landmarks, including the Dharahara tower, have been reduced to rubble following the quake.
• Governments are scrambling to locate thousands of their nationals and relatives took to social media to find their loved ones.
• The international community has also pledged support and aid packages to Nepal. The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has said the US will pledge $1m to the aid effort and will also assist with a disaster response team. Australia has also pledged a Aus$5m aid package, while India, Sri Lanka, the UK, China and others are all sending disaster response teams to assist in search and rescue.
• Weather reports suggested that survivors of the quake – who are sleeping outside because of fear of unsafe building – will face heavy downpours in the next week.

Where Australian charities will be forced to cut programs

Charity	Countries losing aid projects
Care Australia	PNG, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, West Bank (Palestinian Territories)
ActionAid	Afghanistan, Uganda, Kenya
Oxfam	Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Timor Leste, Vanuatu, Bangladesh, South Africa
World Vision	Kenya, Senegal, South Sudan, Uganda, India, Laos, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Peru, West Bank (Palestinian Territories)
Plan International	Indonesia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda, Cambodia, Timor Leste, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar
ChildFund	PNG, Timor Leste, Laos and Sri Lanka

 [see following article for background]