http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/world/asia/nepal-earthquake-foreign-rescuers.html?_r=0
Nepal Asks Foreign Rescuers to Leave as Hopes Fade
By GARDINER HARRISMAY 4, 2015
KATHMANDU, Nepal — The government of Nepal is asking foreign search-and-rescue teams to leave now that the likelihood of finding survivors buried by last month’s earthquake has largely passed, and a top Nepalese tourism official said Monday that no more climbers were likely to ascend Mount Everest this season. A Japanese rescue team in Sankhu, Nepal, on Friday. The death toll from the earthquake now exceeds 7,300. Some rescue workers said they would stay despite the government’s request.
“We have already asked them to go home,” Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, a Home Ministry spokesman, said on Monday of the foreign rescue teams, adding that roughly half the 4,000 rescuers had already left. “I think all the rescuers will go to their respective countries by Friday.”
Some of the rescuers, however, said they had no intention of leaving immediately.
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The leader of a large Spanish team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized by his embassy to speak publicly, said Nepal’s government would soon divide Kathmandu, the capital, into sectors so that various teams would have responsibility for specific parts of the city. In the early days of the rescue effort, teams often ended up searching the same sites because of a lack of coordination.
Asked whom his team could still rescue, the leader responded: “Whoever is still alive. We don’t yet know if anyone is still in there.”
“We have the technology for surveying under the rubble; we have dogs that sniff people out,” the team leader said. “And we have other kinds of techniques.”
There seems almost no chance that anyone alive is still trapped amid the rubble from the quake, which struck just before noon on April 25. On Sunday, though, three survivors were found in the Sindhupalchok district, an especially hard hit and largely rural area north of Kathmandu. The official death toll now exceeds 7,300.
“More is not better at this point,” Dr. Norton said. “If you’re not contributing, you need to make way for those who are.”
Dr. Norton said that the thousands of rescuers, who often work as firefighters in their home countries, had saved a total of 16 people in the aftermath of the quake, and that about 50 foreign medical teams comprising nearly 10,000 people had saved hundreds of lives and even more limbs. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, nearly 2,000 rescuers saved 13 people, but nearly 30,000 Haitians died because of a lack of proper medical care, Dr. Norton said.
Foreign rescue workers in Kathmandu last week. Some teams said they had no intention of leaving the country, despite the government's request. Credit Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
“I’m not saying rescue teams are bad, but there needs to be a balance,” Dr. Norton said. “This announcement by the Nepali government is completely appropriate.”
Mr. Dhakal explained that many of the rescue teams had refused to take part in the task of recovering dead bodies from the still-towering piles of rubble in some parts of Kathmandu, “so their relevance is now over.”
Minendra Rijal, the minister for information and communication, said, “We do not need ones who are not needed for us, but we will keep those who are essential.”
Also Monday, a group of experienced Sherpas told the government that the Sherpa community had neither the time nor the inclination to do the necessary repairs before bad weather, which usually arrives in the third week of May, made climbing impossible.
Ang Dorjee Sherpa, chairman of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, which is responsible for climbing-route maintenance, said in a telephone interview that an inspection he and others had completed Sunday found that the route through the Khumbu Icefall, which collapsed last year as well, was simply gone.
“We had to work almost for one month to fix the route and rope when it collapsed after last year’s avalanche,” he said. “If we started today, it would take at least 12 to 15 days to rebuild the route and refix the ropes.”
The work would be dangerous because of the instability of the icefall, and with only five climbers at the base camp willing to ascend, there was no point in undergoing the task, he said.
“Since the whole country is suffering from a devastating natural disaster, why should we encourage them to bear yet another risk?” Mr. Sherpa asked, referring to the mountaineers.
Tulsi Prasad Gautam, the head of Nepal’s tourism department, which oversees mountaineering, said in an interview that the Sherpa report most likely spelled the end of this year’s climbing season.
“We’ve been told that many climbers have already left base camp and that it’s not easy to fix the route and rope for climbing within the short window of time we have left,” the tourism official said.
This will be the second consecutive year that the Everest climbing season has been truncated because of a deadly event. Last year, about 30 climbers were crossing a notorious area known by some local residents as the Golden Gate because of the shape of its ice formations when a huge chunk of ice cascaded down the mountain’s south side around 6:30 a.m. and engulfed them, killing 16 Sherpas.
That avalanche, and the outrage among the Sherpas over their pay and safety conditions, forced the cancellation of the climbing season, a crucial part of Nepal’s tourism industry. It was the deadliest day in Everest history until the earthquake this year, which caused a wall of boulders, rocks, ice and debris to pulverize the mountaineering base camp, killing 18 people, including four Americans.
