US marine helicopter and crew still missing after Nepal earthquake

A day-long search failed to find a missing US marine helicopter yesterday, a day after the second Nepal earthquake in less than three weeks killed scores and triggered landslides across the Himalayan nation.

Nepal is still reeling from last month’s devastating quake, which killed more than 8,000 people and injured close to 20,000.

The US helicopter was delivering aid in Dolakha, one of the districts hit hardest by both quakes, on Tuesday when it went missing with six marines and two Nepali soldiers on board.

Six Nepali helicopters and about 400 soldiers found no sign of the UH-1Y Huey in forested and rugged terrain.

“There is no positive confirmation of any sighting of the aircraft, and we have no communication with them at this moment,” said Capt Cassandra Gesecki, a marines spokeswoman. She said there was no evidence to indicate a crash.

Roads in Dolakha were cracked and littered with large boulders, a witness said. In the village of Suspa Kshamawati, 80 per cent of the houses were destroyed.

Krishna Budhathoki (40) now lives in his cattle pen. “We want to be able to build a new home before the monsoon,” he said, “but there’s not enough time to do so now, and how can we build during the rainy season?”

Landslides

The Canadian Red Cross, citing the danger of landslides, pulled a nine-member medical team out of Tatopani, which is on the road from Kathmandu to Tibet and was close to the epicentre of Tuesday’s earthquake.

“When the earthquake happened, big blocks of mountain came down that took away houses,” team leader Cyril Stein said from Kathmandu. “I heard the top of a mountain collapse while I was on the telephone with my team.”

The field clinic, which had been treating more than 50 patients a day, was threatened by a mountain block that looked like it might break loose, he said.

In Dolakha district’s capital, Charikot, other relief and military helicopters brought people who had been injured when buildings collapsed and landslides struck in outlying hamlets to an open-air clinic, where they were treated on bloodied tarpaulins.

The helicopters alternated between evacuating people and searching for the marines’ Huey, which lost radio contact after crew members were heard talking about fuel problems. Two other marine corps Hueys and two tilt-rotor V-22 Ospreys spent about 21 hours in the air searching for the missing helicopter yesterday, the US military said.

Nepal home ministry official Laxmi Prasad Dahal said he feared the search was diverting resources from relief and rescue operations.

“The work of sending relief and rescuing the injured people to hospitals has been delayed due to this,” he said

Hardest hit

A police official in Kathmandu said 80 people had died and 2,376 were injured in Tuesday's quake, which also killed 17 people in neighbouring India. Charikot, 75km east of Kathmandu, was one of the areas hardest hit.

Most of the reported deaths were in towns and villages which, like Charikot, were only starting to recover from last month’s quake.

Tuesday’s earthquake and the subsequent aftershocks forced panic-stricken Nepalis to spend yet another night outdoors in makeshift tents and relief camps.

"It looks like a graveyard here," said Aula Bahadur Ale, the assistant administrator of Dolakha. "Even those houses that have not been flattened have developed cracks. People are too afraid to go into them. We are still feeling the aftershocks that makes people terrified." – (Reuters)