VIDEO: Nepal Earthquake death toll ‘could hit 10,000’

The death toll from the Nepal earthquake disaster could reach 10,000, the country’s prime minister said yesterday.

Reports from the ravaged country say the death toll has passed 5,000, but prime minister Sushil Koirala told Reuters it could eventually be double that.

Some 8m people have been affected by the earthquake in Nepal that killed more than 5,000 people and 1.4m people are in need of food assistance, the UN has said.

UN resident co-ordinator in Kathmandu, Jamie McGoldrick, said that, of those affected, 2m people are in the 11 worst-hit districts.

He said that, four days after Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 quake, “people are still in a very much hardship mode”. The challenge of supplying to small villages at high altitudes and in rough terrain “is quite significant”.

After flying by helicopter over Dhulikhel town, on the north side of the Kathmandu valley, McGoldrick estimated that about 40% of the houses were damaged, but the destruction was erratic. “Some areas on one ridge are completely untouched, on the other side it’s completely flattened,” he said.

Helicopters crisscrossed the skies above the mountains of Nepal’s Gorkha district near the earthquake’s epicentre, ferrying the injured to clinics, and taking emergency supplies back to remote villages.

Two helicopters brought in eight women from Ranachour, two of them clutching babies to their breast, and a third heavily pregnant.

“There are many more injured people in my village,” said Sangita Shrestha, who is pregnant.

Gorkha, the district’s administrative and trading centre, is being used as a staging post to get rescuers and supplies to those remote communities. Some villages were reachable only by air after landslides blocked mountain roads.

Some women who came off the helicopters were grimacing and crying in pain and unable to walk or speak after being injured in the quake.

Sita Karki winced when soldiers lifted her. Her broken 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. My legs are broken,” she said.

Conditions are making it hard to get aid to the worst-affected areas. Geoff Pinnock of the UN’s World Food Programme was leading a convoy of trucks north to Gorkha when heavy rain began to fall. “This rain has caused a landslide that has blocked my trucks. I can maybe get one truck through and take a risk driving on the dirt, but I think we’ll have to hold the materials back to try to get them out tomorrow by helicopter.”

Aid workers who had reached the edges of the epicentre described entire villages reduced to rubble.

“In some villages, about 90% of the houses have collapsed. They’re just flattened,” said Rebecca McAteer, an American doctor who rushed to the quake zone from the distant Nepal hospital where she works.

And yet, the timing of the earthquake, near midday, when most rural people are working in the fields, meant most villagers were spared of injuries when buildings collapsed, she said. Police say they have 373 confirmed deaths in Gorkha district.

Most those injured were young people and the elderly. “The immediate need is getting support to where it’s needed, but there will be a lot of work rebuilding,” said McAteer.

British and Irish medical staff, experts and volunteers have been dispatched to the worst-affected areas .

Dev Ratna Dhakhwa, secretary general of the Nepal Red Cross Society, said Sherpas would be needed to help reach remote areas where survivors may be cut off.

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