Exodus from Everest in wake of avalanche
Print Edition
MOUNTAINEERS, guides and porters streamed from Mount Everest base camp yesterday in the wake of a deadly earthquake-triggered avalanche that obliterated parts of the rocky village of nylon tents. Some warned that dozens of people may still be missing.
The worst injured were ferried out in helicopters, while those remaining at base camp endured a series of powerful aftershocks, some of which caused smaller but still terrifying avalanches in the surrounding mountains.
The avalanche on Saturday, set off by the massive earthquake that struck Nepal, left at least 18 people dead and dozens more injured. Overall, the quake killed more than 2,500 people.
But as the first stunned survivors of the avalanche reached Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, they said that dozens of people may still be missing and were almost certainly dead.
“The snow swept away many tents and people,” said Gyelu Sherpa, a guide among the first group of 15 injured survivors to reach Kathmandu.
The 15, most of them Sherpa guides or support staff working on Everest, flew from Lukla, a small airstrip not far from Everest. None were believed to have life-threatening injuries, but many limped to a bus taking them to hospital.
Bhim Bahadur Khatri, 35, a cook and a Sherpa, was preparing food in a meal tent when the avalanche struck.
“We all rushed out to the open and the next moment a huge wall of snow just piled on me,” he said before being driven to a hospital. “I managed to dig out of what could easily have been my grave. I wiggled and used my hands as claws to dig as much as I could. I was suffocating, I could not breathe. But I knew I had to survive.”
When he finally dug his way out, gulping in fresh air, he was surrounded by devastation. Part of the base camp village was gone.
“I looked around and saw the tents all torn and crushed. Many people were injured,” he said. “I had lived but lost many of my friends.”
The magnitude-7.8 quake struck at around noon Saturday — just over a year after the deadliest avalanche on record hit Everest, killing 16 Sherpa guides on April 18, 2014.
Witnesses said the avalanche began on Mount Pumori, a 7,000-meter-high mountain a few kilometers from Everest, gathering strength as it headed toward base camp and the lower reaches of Everest’s climbing routes. Numerous climbers remained stranded yesterday on routes above base camp, but teams in contact by satellite telephones said no one was believed to be in danger.
Azim Afif, the 27-year-old leader of a climbing team from the University of Technology Malaysia, estimated that 80 percent of the people at base camp had left by mid-afternoon yesterday.
Earlier in the day, Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association said 22 of the most seriously injured had been taken by helicopter for treatment in the village of Pheriche, where the nearest medical facility is located.
Nepal was hit yesterday by a series of aftershocks, triggering more avalanches in the mountains above base camp. No casualties were reported.
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