(Jajarkot) At least 157 people died in an earthquake that shook a remote region of Nepal, where relief efforts are being organized to search for survivors, according to a new report on Saturday from the Nepalese authorities.
The 5.6 magnitude earthquake occurred at a depth of 18 km according to the American Geological Survey USGS. It hit the far western Himalayan country late Friday evening. Its epicenter was located 42 km south of Jumla, not far from the border with Tibet.
“There was a huge noise when the houses collapsed, it sounded like a big explosion,” Shiva Prasad Sharma, 65, told AFP in front of the remains of his destroyed house in Jajarkot, the most populated region. affected by the earthquake.
PHOTO PRAKASH MATHEMA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
View of a destroyed house in Jajarkot
“I thought we were all going to die,” he added. “No one has anything left, there are no houses.”
Videos and photos posted on social media showed residents searching through the rubble in the dark to look for survivors in the collapsed buildings.
We see destroyed or damaged mud houses and survivors crouching outside to protect themselves from possible further collapses, while the sirens of emergency vehicles wail.
“We were sleeping. There were three of us in the house, only two of us survived,” Kamala Oli, a woman we met in a hospital in Nepalgunj, a small town near the Indian border, told AFP.
PHOTO BALKUMAR SHARMA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Survivors are seen in a corridor at the Jajarkot district hospital following the earthquake.
“105 people died in Jajarkot and 52 in Rukum,” Kuber Kathayat, police spokesperson, told AFP in a new report. Authorities said nearly 200 people were injured in these two districts, located south of the epicenter in the border province of Karnali.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior, Narayan Prasad Bhattarai, indicated that the authorities had managed to contact all the affected regions on Saturday, and estimated that the toll should no longer increase too much, even if it “is still possible that we will find some bodies under the debris.”
Nepali security forces have been deployed to earthquake-hit areas to assist in relief operations, according to Karnali provincial police spokesperson Gopal Chandra Bhattarai.
“The isolation of the districts makes it difficult to transmit information,” he added. “Some roads are blocked because of the damage, but we are trying to reach the area by other routes.”
In Jajarkot, the area hospital was stormed by residents transporting injured people there.
Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal arrived in the affected area on Saturday after expressing “deep sadness for the human and physical damage caused by the earthquake.”
“The government is determined to help the victims and treat the injured,” he said.
Major geological fault
Moderate tremors were felt as far away as New Delhi, the capital of India located nearly 500 km from the epicenter.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply saddened” by the human losses in Nepal, and said his country was ready “to provide all possible assistance”.
Earthquakes are common in Nepal, a country which lies on a major geological fault where the Indian tectonic plate sinks into the Eurasian plate, forming the Himalayan range.
The tremor was followed several hours later by aftershocks of magnitude 4 in the same area, according to the USGS.
In 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and destroyed more than half a million homes and more than 8,000 schools.
Hundreds of monuments and royal palaces — including sites in the Kathmandu Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that attract tourists from all over the world — had suffered irreversible damage, affecting Nepalese tourism.