Editor's Note -- The search and rescue team from Fairfax County, Va. also assisted with this operation.
KATMANDU, Nepal — With the help of Los Angeles firefighters, rescuers Thursday pulled a teenage boy from the wreckage of a nine-story Katmandu hotel that collapsed around him five days ago when an enormous earthquake shook Nepal.
Pemba Lama, 15, was carried out on a stretcher, his face covered in dust. Medics had put an IV drip into his arm and a blue brace had been placed around his neck. He appeared stunned, and he blinked in the sunlight, but had no serious injuries.
In an interview from an Israeli field hospital, the teenager appeared frail but sounded stoic as he recounted his long ordeal in the debris pile.
Lama, who has a tattoo of the Hindu god Shiva on his arm, said he suffered from horrific hallucinations. “There were times when I thought I was dead and then I would wake up again to find myself beneath the rubble” he said. “I survived on ghee that I found in a bottle there, scraping until the last dollop to feed myself.”
Nepali rescue teams had been using a bright orange excavator to clear rubble at the site. Suddenly, they heard a yell. “I saw something bright outside as the excavator moved the rubble around me and then I screamed for help,” Lama said.
The team treating him at the Israeli medical camp in Chhauni, Katmandu, was surprised to find him not just alive but in such good condition. “This is nothing short of a miracle to find him alive after five days and that too with no major injury; he was only dehydrated,” said Dr. Sakhi Dagan, who was overseeing Lama’s treatment at the camp.
When the earthquake began, Lama, a hotel employee, recalled, “I hurried downstairs from the cash counter when I felt the strong tremors ... after that everything came crashing down.” He said he didn’t remember anything after that until several hours later, when he woke and found himself in the rubble.
Narayan Thapa, the on-scene commander for Nepali armed police, said rescue workers were continuing to search for two other children that Lama had said were trapped in the debris. Lama told authorities on the scene he had been able to speak with the two children, a girl of about 6 and a boy aged 12 or 13, until about 4 a.m.
Rescue teams from both the Los Angeles County Fire Department and Fairfax County, Va., rescue teams — who are members of USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team — were using listening devices and dogs to try to find the children.
Chris Schaff, a battalion chief with the Fairfax County Fire Department, said this was the first live rescue the U.S. teams had conducted since arriving in Nepal. “It gets a little discouraging near the end (of the survival window),” he said, “so it was great to be able to assist the Nepali rescue team on this.”
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Search team manager Andrew Olvera, a fire captain normally based in Palos Verdes, Calif., said he arrived on the scene around 9:30 a.m. The Nepali forces on the scene did not have cameras, he said, though they did have “breaching and breaking” tools like jackhammers and saws.
The U.S. team was able to insert a camera and determine how to most efficiently and safely extract the teenager, Olvera said, emphasizing it was a cooperative effort with dozens of Nepalis on scene.
L.B. Basnet, the Nepali Armed Police officer who crawled into a gap in the rubble to reach Lama, said he was surprisingly responsive.
“He thanked me when I first approached him,” said Basnet. “He told me his name, his address, and I gave him some water. I assured him we were near to him.”
Basnet said that when he reached the teen, the boy began singing to him, “You are a god who has come to me to try to save me.”
The route to the teen was blocked by a motorbike, and above him was a heavy metal shutter. As Basnet tried to extricate him, the shutter began to fall. He propped it up with a little jack.
Rescuers eventually used more jacks to lift the concrete slabs that had wedged Lama in, said Basnet. Basnet and his colleagues had been working at the site for four days.
Twisted ropes of steel reinforcing rods were all that stopped huge concrete slabs from falling onto the scene. Two concrete floors hung down in front of the building like curtains.
“He was a very fortunate young man,” Olvera said. “He obviously has a strong will to be in there six days and come out talking to us.”
The USAID disaster assistance response team, or DART, includes 57 personnel from Fairfax, 57 from Los Angeles and 12 search dogs, six from each county.
“I feel fortunate the U.S. government has brought us around the world to utilize our skills and help people,” said Olvera.
The rescue was a rare bit of good news in a city that has known little but despair since the earthquake hit Saturday, leaving more than 5,500 people dead across this poverty-racked Himalayan nation.
On Wednesday, a French team pulled a 27-year-old man alive from a building in Katmandu. But on the same day, a senior Nepalese Army officer urged that foreign rescue teams like the USAID squad be sent home because there was no chance of finding survivors.
Thirty-two teams from 15 countries, comprising 1,200 specialists, have been sent to Nepal since Saturday, but Brig. Gen. Davendra Bahadur Medhasi said in a letter to the Home Ministry that they should be sent home, the Himalayan newspaper reported.
On Thursday, Thapa said such a suggestion was premature. “We can find more people,” he said. “Today is the sixth day,” he said. “It depends on the willpower of the people. We can still find people on the seventh, eighth, even ninth day.”
As the afternoon wore on, the search continued for the other two reportedly trapped victims. Occasionally, an eerie hush fell over the site as authorities asked for complete quiet so the listening devices would not pick up stray sounds.
Though hope remained for the two children, the smell of rotting flesh pervading the site indicated that bodies were buried under the debris.
Lama, from Nuwakot district about 80 kilometers west of Katmandu, said he came to the capital a few years ago as his mother was about to leave for a job in the Middle East; many Nepalis work abroad to send money home.
“I first worked as a bus conductor for few months before starting work at the hotels in Katmandu,” he said. He indicated he was no longer very close with his family, and said he had never been to school.
Even after the ordeal, his mind still seemed to be focused on getting back to work. “I want to be able to work again soon,” he said, “but I don’t know.”
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(Rai is a special correspondent.)
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