ASIA PACIFIC

Nepal Rattled by Powerful New Earthquake East of Capital

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Life Suspended in Rural Nepal

Life Suspended in Rural Nepal

On a steep cliff northeast of Kathmandu, one family is forced to live outside, mourning the dead and worrying that rains from the coming monsoons will create more deadly landslides.
By Rajneesh Bhandari on  May 12, 2015. 
NEW DELHI — A powerful earthquake shook eastern Nepal on Tuesday, shattering the halting recovery from the earthquake that hit the country less than three weeks ago, and causing loose hillsides and cracked buildings to give way and collapse.
By late afternoon, Nepal’s National Emergency Operation Center had reported 42 deaths and 1,117 injuries from Tuesday’s earthquake, which the United States Geological Survey assigned a preliminary magnitude of 7.3. The death toll from the April 25 earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8, has reached 8,159 and continues to rise.
Residents and office workers ran screaming into the streets when the temblor struck, shortly after noon, and people described clouds of mud and dust rising up as cracked structures fell. Prakash Banjara, an engineering student, was on an aid mission with 15 other students, delivering rice to remote villages in Sindhupalchowk District, when “the earth started shaking so violently.”
“The mountains before my eyes started tumbling down in massive landslides,” Mr. Banjara said by telephone. He begged for help for his small group of volunteers, now stranded by landslides on an isolated road, unable to contact the police and fearing the approach of a predicted storm.
SLIDE SHOW|8 Photos

Nepal Rattled by Another Earthquake

Nepal Rattled by Another Earthquake

Mast Irham/European Pressphoto Agency 
“We are clinging together on the road, hoping the clouds will go away,” he said. “I saw buildings crumble as we made our way here. Maybe there are people trapped in them. We have no way of knowing yet.”
The latest major earthquake came just as ordinary life was returning to Nepal, its streets once again alive with vegetable markets and dumpling stands. Jasmine Avgerakis, who is stationed in Sindhupalchowk with the charity Mercy Corps, said she has watched people overcome the trauma of the first earthquake, roll up their sleeves and set about cleaning up.
“They were just starting to go home and feel comfortable there,” she said.

Photographs of Earthquake Devastation in Nepal 

Tuesday’s quake, she said, brought “the sight of panic. Children were crying; seeing them run from their homes to this field, there was just so much fear in their faces. They had been starting to move on slightly, in areas that had the means to. You could see movement.” With the new earthquake, she said, “they went back to the pain again.”
The epicenter of Tuesday’s earthquake was about 50 miles east of Kathmandu, near the border with China, whose towns and villages were also devastated by the April 25 quake. The largest cluster of deaths, 19, was registered in the district of Dolakha, a mountainous and sparsely populated region where the elevation reaches 7,314 meters, or just under 24,000 feet. Seventy-seven people in Dolakha died in the April 25 earthquake, officials said.
Gajendra Thakur, who oversees relief work for the district, described conditions in Dolakha as “very, very severe.”
April 25
magnitude 7.8
earthquake
Tuesday
magnitude 7.3
earthquake
CHINA
NEPAL
Mount Everest
Pokhara
Kathmandu
INDIA
100 miles
By The New York Times; satellite image by NASA/U.S.G.S. Landsat via Google Earth 
Since the April 25 quake, people across Nepal have feared another powerful one, in part because the first one left many buildings unstable, and many people refused to sleep indoors for more than a week. A vast number of buildings appear too dangerous even to enter, with ground floors buckling outward and deep cracks running up their facades. There have also been a number of aftershocks and minor quakes.
An American structural engineer who examined buildings in Bhaktapur, an ancient pink-brick city near Kathmandu, said he believed that a third of the buildings he had seen would have to be demolished.
Ranveig Tveitnes, the deputy leader of the Norwegian Red Cross team in the hard-hit city of Chautara, said many of the houses in town that had survived the first earthquake collapsed entirely on Tuesday, and the road through town that had been painstakingly cleared of debris was once again blocked by rubble.
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Videos Capture Second Quake in Nepal

Videos Capture Second Quake in Nepal

Witnesses recorded the moment and aftermath of a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that shook Nepal on Tuesday, just weeks after one there killed more than 8,000 people.
 May 12, 2015. Photo by Rajneesh Bhandari for The New York Times.
Two people were brought dead to the mobile Red Cross hospital there on Tuesday, and 40 injured people had been brought in by midafternoon, with more arriving as evening approached. Ms. Tveitnes said no one had had time to count them yet. Doctors who had transitioned to treating everyday illnesses went back to setting bones and trauma surgery.
Search and rescue teams — including international teams that had been preparing to leave — began digging through the rubble looking for survivors. Bharat Shrestha, who was participating in rescue operations in a town about seven miles west of Chautara, said the efforts began while the earth was still rumbling from aftershocks.
“I can still see massive clouds of mud and dust around, as massive landslides continue to happen,” he said. “Concrete houses in Chautara have crumbled, and the main road leading to Chautara is completely blocked with debris.”

Photographs: Nepal’s Historic Sites, Before and After the Earthquake 

Even before Tuesday’s earthquake, aid workers worried that wealthy nations seemed unwilling to fund the relief effort in Nepal, having pledged only about 15 percent of the initial appeal for $423 million, said Jamie McGoldrick, the resident coordinator for the United Nations in Nepal.
“The international community seems quite reluctant to provide material,” he said.
On Tuesday, as in the April 25 earthquake, panic spread throughout Kathmandu, snarling traffic and jamming phone lines, but the number of building collapses was not as catastrophic as some had feared. Four guesthouses collapsed in the city’s Gongabu neighborhood, a popular stopping point for migrant laborers waiting for flights to the gulf states or Malaysia, said Kamal Singh Bam, a police spokesman. He said people were presumed dead inside.

Map: Maps of the Damage From the Nepal Earthquakes 

Kunda Dixit, the editor of The Nepali Times, described “some degree of panic” as the tremor “just became bigger and bigger and bigger, started rocking more and more and more.” He said that office workers ran into the street and that electric power was out and telephones were blocked.
“It started slow, it kept on swaying, and the birds were up in the air,” he said. “I looked outside and the electricity poles were just swaying from side to side, the wires were swaying.”
Video footage taken at the airport in Kathmandu showed hundreds of people rushing for the exits. Madhu Prasad Regmi, the secretary of Nepal’s Election Commission, which is based in the capital, said that workers rushed out onto the street and remained unwilling to return to their desks four hours later.
“The fear on people’s faces is very visible,” he said. “There are regular aftershocks. So the fear is very visible.”
CCTV, China’s state-run broadcaster, reported that one person had been killed and two injured in a landslide in Gyirong County, Tibet, that was triggered by the earthquake. Eight people also died in the Indian state of Bihar, which borders eastern Nepal, officials said.
The country’s exhaustion was evident in a message sent via a government Twitter account about two hours after the earthquake.
“Pray to Almighty: Keep all Nepalese safe in this difficult period of time,” read the message, sent from the Nepal Emergency Operations Center.
Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Hari Kumar, Suhasini Raj and Nida Najar from New Delhi.
Reporting was contributed by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong, and Hari Kumar, Suhasini Raj and Nida Najar from New Delhi.