Nepal Megathread

[The Brain]

I suspect being IN the icefall when a aftershock hits, ladders or no ladders, would rather suck in a fatal way...

It is possible to helicopter into Camp 1, but it is dangerous itself - it is ride on the edge of where helicopters can really operate. Indeed, for a long time it was considered beyond that edge.

The other problem is simply resources. Nepal is almost certainly a mess right now - are the lives of those stuck on Everest more important than the lives of those NOT stuck on Everest? Maybe not even an issue.

Yeah I got this feeling that maybe helicopters are a bit in demand right now.

[jimmy olsen]

Nepal's government seems pretty useless, maybe India should just annex them. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0

Nepal earthquake: authorities struggle to cope despite international aid efforts

Nepalese government says it is overwhelmed with requests for help across the country, as everything from paramedics to electricity remain in short supply


Jason Burke in Kathmandu, Justin McCurry, Sam Jones and agencies

Monday 27 April 2015 18.57 BST  Last modified on Tuesday 28 April 2015 00.00 BST 

A huge international aid operation is being mobilised to help the victims of the earthquake in Nepal, which has left tens of thousands of people homeless and raised fears of food and medicine shortages and an increased risk of waterborne and infectious diseases.

As the death toll from Saturday's quake passed 4,000, the Nepalese government said it was struggling to cope with the aftermath of the disaster and reach those cut off in remote areas.

"We are overwhelmed with rescue and assistance requests from all across the country," said Deepak Panda, a member of the country's disaster management agency.

Lila Mani Poudyal, the government's chief secretary and the rescue coordinator, appealed for more help from the international community, saying Nepal was short of everything from paramedics to electricity.

"We are appealing for tents, dry goods, blankets, mattresses, and 80 different medicines ... that we desperately need now," he told reporters. "We don't have the helicopters that we need or the expertise to rescue the people trapped."

Hospital beds in Kathmandu are already full, forcing other sick and injured people to seek makeshift treatment in the street alongside thousands of displaced survivors whose homes were destroyed or are in imminent danger of collapse after being weakened by the 7.8-magnitude quake.
 
The UN World Food Programme said on Monday that it was anticipating "a massive operation" and had mobilised all its food stocks on the region, while the World Health Organisation said it had already distributed medical supplies to cover the health needs of more than 40,000 people for three months in the country.

The UN children's agency, Unicef, said at least 940,000 Nepalese children are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, adding that those left homeless by the earthquake were particularly vulnerable.

"There have been reports of dwindling supplies of water and food, power outages, and downed communication networks," it said in a statement.

"Hundreds of thousands of people spent the night sleeping in open areas, out of fear of more tremors. Heavy rain is now also reported which can further worsen the conditions. This crisis leaves children particularly vulnerable – limited access to safe water and sanitation will put children at great risk from waterborne diseases, while some children may have become separated from their families."


On Monday, the Disasters Emergency Committee – a coalition of UK aid charities including Oxfam, Save the Children and the British Red Cross – launched an appeal in response to the crisis.

The British government, which has pledged £5m towards the disaster relief effort, said it would dispatch an RAF transport plane to Nepal carrying a team of Gurkha engineers, more than 1,100 shelter kits and over 1,700 solar lanterns.

India flew in medical supplies and members of its disaster response force, while China sent a 60-strong emergency team. Pakistan's army said it was sending four C-130 aircraft with a 30-bed hospital, search-and-rescue teams and relief supplies.

A US military aircraft with 70 personnel was due to arrive in Kathmandu on Monday. Australia, Britain and New Zealand said they were sending specialist urban search-and-rescue teams to Kathmandu. Britain was also delivering supplies and medics.


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Despite fears that the death toll would soar once contact was restored with cut-off areas, reports from the remote Nepalese district of Ghorka - close to the epicentre of Saturday's quake - suggested the number of casualties could be fewer than has been feared, even if a high proportion of buildings were badly damaged.


Officials said on Monday the total number of dead and wounded in Ghorka was still unclear but, having had contact with most of their outlying administrators, they thought it would be "in the hundreds, not the thousands".


By late-afternoon, the overall confirmed total across the country was 3,922 dead and nearly 7,180 injured. An avalanche triggered by the quake killed 18 people at Mount Everest's base camp, while 85 people were killed in India and China.

More than 1,300 of the fatalities were from the heavily populated Kathmandu valley, while another 944 were from the district of Sindulpalchuk, east of the Nepalese capital.


Mountainous areas to the west of the epicentre – such as Manaslu, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna – had experienced only light damage, officials and trekking agencies said.

In Kavre district, as elsewhere, the growing problem is the huge number of homeless people. Of a population of 380,000, not more than 250 have been killed and around 900 injured, said the chief administrator, Sudarshan Parsad Dhakal. But, Dhakal said, about 100,000 people had lost their homes.

"It is not just the buildings that are in ruins. There are many others that are now uninhabitable. We need at least 3,000 family tents, blankets too and dry food for three days," he said.

In Kathmandu itself remains are still being brought out of the rubble. In one outlying district, Bhaktapur, about 30,000 people are thought to be homeless, officials say.

The earthquake – Nepal's worst in more than 80 years – has left thousands sleeping in the open while authorities battle against time to rescue anyone still alive beneath the rubble.

On Mount Everest, the evacuation began on Monday of hundreds of climbers trapped after a huge avalanche flattened the base camp, killing 18 and injuring 61 in the worst disaster to hit the mountain. The death toll on the mountain is likely to rise as no one knows how many people were at base camp and in the vicinity.


Many of the dead are locals, making this the second year running that the sherpa and other communities have been hit hard on Everest. Only one of the major expeditions has its camp intact and it seems very unlikely anyone will be continuing any climb on the peak.

While survivors wait for aid, rescue teams are continuing the frantic search for survivors, despite being exhausted by two nights of ceaseless work. "The rescue workers are in a really bad shape. We are all about to collapse. We have worked two straight nights," said home ministry official Laxmi Prasad Dhakal.

Rescuers used their bare hands, with no protective gear or heat detectors, in their search for survivors in what remains of the Dharahara tower. The narrow alleys would stop cranes, earthmovers or diggers reaching most of the houses that have collapsed, even if the aftershocks had not scared workers out of even trying, said Shyam Adhikari, the local police chief.

"Anyway, there's not much point. There are some entire families buried. We know because no one reported them missing. No one is alive under the rubble," he said.

With so many people sleeping in the open with no power or water and downpours forecast, there were mounting fears of major food and water shortages.

"There is no electricity, no water. Our main challenge and priority is to restore electricity and water," Dhakal said. "The next big challenge is the supply of food. Shopkeepers are unable to go in and open their shops. So people are facing difficulty buying food."

The immediate aftermath has underlined Nepal's inability to cope with a disaster of this scale. The country has a population of 28 million, with only 2.1 doctors and 50 hospital beds for every 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation.


"The earthquake has exposed that Nepal's best public hospital infrastructure has crumbled at a time when it should serve more people in a hurry," said Sarvendra Moongla, a senior surgeon at Bir Hospital's trauma centre in Kathmandu.

[alfred russel]

Yeah I got this feeling that maybe helicopters are a bit in demand right now.

Lots of those helicopters are privately owned. I have a hunch that a westerner with cash, which presumably covers all the westerners on everest above base camp, will have no trouble finding a helicopter.

I don't know the rates in Nepal, but in Tanzania I inquired regarding the cost of a high altitude helicopter rescue. I was told it would be $3,000. By western standards, that is cheap (in Switzerland if uninsured I've been told it is more like $10,000, and altitudes there are not as high). But that is still several times the per capita annual income in Tanzania. The money for saving your average local just isn't there.

[jimmy olsen]

I don't know if it's true, but I read that Sherpa's guiding western tourists up Everest make $20 a day, three dollars more than President.

EDIT: Looked it up, he makes $35-36 a day.

[sbr]

I don't know if it's true, but I read that Sherpa's guiding western tourists up Everest make $20 a day, three dollars more than President.

EDIT: Looked it up, he makes $35-36 a day.

Do they give a refund if they eat their customers?

[alfred russel]

I don't know if it's true, but I read that Sherpa's guiding western tourists up Everest make $20 a day, three dollars more than President.

EDIT: Looked it up, he makes $35-36 a day.

I'm sure it is very much dependent on what the Sherpa is doing. I don't believe that most westerners use sherpas as true guides to the summit of everest: many and I suspect most use western guides. Sherpas can be used for everything from brewing tea in base camp, to working as a porter up the mountain, to setting fixed ropes, to serving as a personal assistant to climbers on summit attempts (which is very similar to guiding), to acting as a true guide responsible for technical decisions, etc.

[jimmy olsen]

So used to thinking of Gupta as a talking head on tv, hard to imagine him doing stuff like this.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/27/world/nepal-earthquake-bir-hospital/index.html

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN)—An ambulance arrives, and a young girl with a bandaged head and badly blackened eye is rushed into Kathmandu's Bir Hopital on a wheelchair amid much commotion.

She is Selena Dohal, 8, and her skull was fractured when a massive earthquake shook her neighborhood, two and a half hours from the Nepalese capital, to the ground on Saturday.

Blood has collected on top of her brain, in the right frontal area, and she urgently needs surgery to remove the clots.

"She went to get some water, and a house collapsed on her head," her grandfather Ram Prasad Duhal tells a doctor.

Her grandfather has accompanied Selena to the capital from Panchhkal while her parents take care of her injured brother, who has fractures to both legs.



The girl has received some treatment at another hospital but has been brought to Bir in the hopes her life can be saved.

"She was badly crushed. The roof of the house was on her. She was found after a few hours," neurosurgeon Bikesh Khambu says.

She receives a craniotomy in a makeshift operating room. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent, has scrubbed up at the request of a Nepalese medical team to help with the operation.

The conditions are less than ideal. Gupta washes up using sterile water and iodine poured from a bottle rather than hot water from a scrub sink. Instead of electric drills, he relies on saws of the variety usually only used in war zones and natural disasters due to the lack of electricity.

Despite the suboptimal conditions, the operation is a success, and her prognosis is good, Gupta says. It might not look it, but Selena is one of the lucky ones.

Thousands were killed when a devastating earthquake rocked Nepal on Saturday. More thousands were injured, many of whom have flooded the capital's overstretched hospitals.

"I've seen a lot of situations around the world, and this is as bad as I've ever seen it," Gupta says.

"They need more resources, they need more personnel here right now, and they're expecting many more patients as these rescue operations go on.

"They're barely able to keep up right now. It's part of the reason they asked me (to help); I think they're asking anybody to try to pitch in."

'Everyone is scared to be here'


Bir Hospital, a government facility, is one of the busiest in Kathmandu.

Its inpatient wing, now scarred with cracks, was abandoned after big aftershocks Sunday, and doctors have scrambled to accommodate the influx of victims.

More than 3,900 were killed in Nepal by the 7.8-magnitude quake, the strongest to hit the region in more than 80 years. More than 7,100 were reported to have been injured, but officials fear that number will be much higher once information emerges from remote areas.

Many of the wounded are now across the road from the hospital at the Nepal Army Pavilion, a huge open space in central Kathmandu, and tarps have been erected at the front of the hospital for people to have shelter.

Patients are housed here alongside other local residents who have fled their homes, finding shelter under tents.

"You should have been here yesterday. The building was shaking, and we all had to run out across the road," neurosurgeon Paresh Mani Shrestha says.

"Everyone is scared to be there. We evacuated the patients; no one wants to go there to work."

Looking for missing loved ones in Nepal? CNN iReport wants to help


Hospital's early triage: 'Dead or alive'


Bir Hospital is a chaotic scene Monday as ambulances race in discharging new admissions, patients wail on stretchers in the lobby and distraught family members mill about.

"We have about 150 patients, but more are pouring in because the rescue is just happening," Shrestha says.

"When it happened on Saturday, all we could do was go 'dead or alive' -- that was the only triage we could do."

He says they received about 80 patients from Dharahara, the historic nine-story tower destroyed in the quake.

"There was nothing coming in yesterday," Shrestha says. But now the rescue is underway, and patients are arriving at Bir from less-equipped satellite hospitals.

Among them is a Western woman in a wheelchair, her arm in an improvised splint of branches. She comes from Langtang, north of Kathmandu, where reports are arriving of immense devastation.

Doctors are seeing patients with head injuries, pelvic and lower and upper limb fractures, Shrestha says.

Read earthquake stories from social media


Aid is on the way, but will it be enough?


Hospitals were running short on supplies despite international efforts to rush in aid. Numerous aid groups and at least 16 nations rushed aid and workers to Nepal, with more on the way.

And although the surgeons at Bir Hospital were able to save the life of young Selena, international aid agencies have warned that other children may not be so lucky.

UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, said Sunday that nearly 1 million Nepalese children urgently need assistance.

But some aid flights were delayed over the weekend due to aftershocks, leading to fears that many more may die before they get the help they desperately need.

[Eddie Teach]

So used to thinking of Gupta as a talking head on tv, hard to imagine him doing stuff like this.

Really, I'm kinda used to thinking of Gupta as a British lawyer. 

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like the after effects of this quake could be more deadly than the quake itself.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nepal-earthquake/cholera-nepal-n349686

[jimmy olsen]

Just gets worse

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nepal-earthquake/nepal-army-chief-n351071

Nepal Earthquake: Army Chief Says Up to 15,000 May Have Died

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Up to 15,000 people may have died in the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal over the weekend, the country's army chief told NBC News in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

The official death toll from Saturday's 7.8-magnitude quake quake currently stands at 5,800.

"Our estimates are not looking good. We are thinking that 10,000 to 15,000 may be killed," said Gen. Gaurav Rana, who is leading the nationwide rescue effort.

Rana acknowledged that massive temblor left officials struggling to cope with the aftermath — including the risk of disease and growing public anger at the pace of the rescue effort.

"There is unrest, and we are watching it. Yes, there is the threat of an epidemic, and we are watching it," he said.

Rana said he understood how many people "would be angry" about the government's response, stressing that the army was working with the police to "identify local hot spots and control things [politically]."

On Wednesday, hundreds of Nepalis protested outside parliament to demand the government boost the number of buses going to the interior hills and improve aid distribution. The official search and rescue effort has also been widely criticized in the press.

[jimmy olsen]

A 7.3 just hit!
Hell of an aftershock, those poor people.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nepal-earthquake/nepal-hit-7-3-magnitude-earthquake-panic-reported-kathmandu-n357481

[Iormlund]

I learned the other day that a former classmate was among those lost in the first quake. Really small world.

[Caliga]

Wow 

[jimmy olsen]

I learned the other day that a former classmate was among those lost in the first quake. Really small world.

What are the odds...

[lustindarkness]

Is a 7.3 considered an aftershock?