Kathmandu evades worst-case scenario

Kunda Dixit thought his home city had been utterly destroyed when the biggest earthquake in the area for 80 years struck central Nepal on Saturday.

Mr Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times, was trekking in the hills above the capital Kathmandu. "From up there, it looked like there was nothing left. I feared the worst," he said on Monday as the death toll from the 7.9 magnitude earthquake rose above 3,600. "The whole city was shrouded in dust."

"But when we got in, I started seeing that even precariously built structures in concrete were still standing."

Given the severity of the shaking, residents say it is remarkable how few buildings in this notoriously overcrowded and rapidly built city of about 1.75m people collapsed at the time or in the numerous aftershocks. Many streets looked unscathed on Monday except for the shuttered shops and offices. Kathmandu has no mains gas and there was no sign of fires.

Central Nepal has suffered a humanitarian disaster but seems to have escaped what could have been an unimaginably worse catastrophe.

Many of the buildings that did fall down in Kathmandu were ancient monuments of bricks, mud and mortar, along with a few multistorey reinforced concrete buildings that leaned sideways or had their floors "pancake" on top of each other.

Scores of the capital's more than 900 deaths were among visitors at the 19th-century brick-built Dharara tower - a structure like a large lighthouse that collapsed in a heap - and guests at a budget hotel in the tourist district of Thamel. Police could be seen extracting a woman from the rubble of another hostel near the bus terminal on Monday morning and rushing her to hospital.

"My eyes are full of tears. When I look around everything is destroyed," said Sushovan Thapa, a 32-year-old loans executive at a finance company, surveying the destruction in Durbar Square, the historic city centre.

He had just finished praying at the undamaged image of Kal Bhairav, a black-skinned god garlanded with serpents and human heads who is the aggressive incarnation of the Lord Shiva. "He's not responsible for this but protects human beings from evil," said Mr Thapa. "It's a natural disaster."

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"The timing was ideal if you have to have a terrible earthquake. Nobody at school, nobody in their offices," said Lisa Choegyal, a tour operator who is also the honorary New Zealand consul. "Even in the worst areas we've had trekkers that were OK.

"Most of the big buildings have survived surprisingly well, better than predicted. The rescue effort's being extraordinarily well co-ordinated. We're lucky that the airport is open," added Ms Choegyal.

On Saturday, she was attending a ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli at the Australian High Commission and had to hang on to a chair to stay upright as the ground shook and tiles fell off roofs. "It could be so much worse."

The town of Pokhara to the west also emerged with relatively little damage, but preliminary aerial surveys of Ghorka - close to the epicentre between Kathmandu and Pokhara - suggest that a large proportion of buildings have been destroyed, raising the possibility of high casualties in the Himalayan foothills of Mount Manaslu.

"The villages and towns in those areas have been really flattened," said Mr Choegyal, who had spoken to people in that part of Nepal.

Many residents of Kathmandu, terrified by the prospect of another earthquake, have been sleeping outside, and encampments with tents and tarpaulins have been set up on open ground across the city. At the Annapurna Hotel, dozens of guests chose to sleep outside on swimming pool loungers in a marquee set up outside.

For the second day, wild rumours swept across the city on Monday that the BBC and other respected sources of news had announced there would be another, larger earthquake at noon, but the time passed without incident.

Drivers of cars and motorcycles formed orderly queues for fuel, while dozens of poorer residents piled into buses and trucks and headed south for the plains. At least one ATM run by Standard Chartered bank was dispensing cash.

Kathmandu, in short, has survived the earthquake, but has lost hundreds of lives and seen some of its historic monuments destroyed.

Sitting next to the tents in the garden at his home, Mr Dixit pointed to the district of Patan and lamented the destruction of its old buildings. "We grew up with these temples," he said. "They were like friends. Seeing all these things gone is really shocking."

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