THE DEATH toll from the weekend earthquake in the Himalayas neared 100 today as rescue workers struggled to reach remote villages and helicopters airlifted the injured and stranded.
Sunday’s (September 18) 6.9-magnitude quake struck the border of India’s northeastern state of Sikkim and Nepal, bringing destruction to towns and villages on both sides as well as in southern Tibet.
From a helipad in Mangan in northern Sikkim, military and private helicopters flew regular sorties, taking food and medical supplies to outlying villages and bringing back injured survivors and a number of foreign tourists.
In Gangtok, around 70 km (40 miles) southeast of the epicentre, government official Sonam Lepcha said provisional figures put the number of dead in Sikkim at 65, but that is likely to rise.
“We fear that more lives have been lost, but it’s very difficult to give an exact count because bodies are still being pulled from the debris,” Lepcha said.
Rescue efforts began in earnest today after emergency teams and relief workers spent two days battling heavy rains, damaged roads and landslides to reach the quake’s main impact zone.
SK Pradhan, the district magistrate of Chungtang, one of the worst-hit areas, said he saw signs of badly damaged villages as he flew over the sparsely populated area.
“We could see bodies lying in the debris, but for now our priority is to evacuate the injured and then we will take stock of the dead,” he said.
“We are still not able to contact many remote villages.”
Doctors at Mangan district hospital said most of the seriously injured had badly crushed limbs and bodies after being caught in rockfalls or building collapses.
A company building a huge hydroelectric plant in Chungtang said 18 of its employees had been killed.
S Krishnamurthy, the boss of the Teesta III power project, said most of its 4,000 workers were on holiday when the quake struck, with only one – an engineer – killed on site.
Another four employees were killed when their homes collapsed, while 13 perished in landslides on the surrounding mountain roads, he said.
In Mangan, relatives of people living in and around the epicentre gathered in groups, sharing what little information they could glean about the fate of their family members.
Most had heard nothing from their families since the quake hit on Sunday evening.
More than 40 stranded tourists, including a number of foreigners, had been airlifted to safety, army officials said. Sikkim’s Himalayan trekking trails are a popular adventure tourism destination.
Around a million people visit Sikkim every year and an estimated 60 per cent of the state’s population of 500,000 rely on tourism for their livelihood.
In Nepal, eight people were killed and hundreds of homes were destroyed or damaged in the east of the country, where rescuers faced the same problems as their Indian counterparts with rains and mudslides blocking routes to the affected areas.
Eighteen other people died in Bihar and West Bengal, while China’s official Xinhua news agency said seven people had been killed in southern Tibet, near the border with Sikkim.
