Now this is a Yankees miracle!
A Nepalese teen — wearing a Yankees T-shirt — survived 120 hours buried under rubble before he was pulled to safety Thursday in the quake-ravaged capital of Kathmandu.
The teen was dazed and dusty as rescuers fitted him with a neck brace, stuck an IV into his arm and carried him out on a stretcher.
His navy blue Yankees T-shirt, with the iconic interlocking “NY,” was plainly visible as onlookers and rescuers cheered the teen’s deliverance to safety.
Tamang had been trapped under debris that was once a seven-story building in Kathmandu since Saturday, when a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck and unleashed a series of aftershocks.
Tamang was remarkably alert and coherent despite the tortuous past five days, said police officer L.B. Basnet, among the men who pulled the teen to safety.
“He thanked me when I first approached him,” Basnet said. “He told me his name, his address, and I gave him some water. I assured him we were near to him.”
Tamang’s rescue has become one of the few precious stories of hope to emerge out of Nepal in recent days.
Saturday’s quake was followed by more than 70 aftershocks of at least magnitude 3.2, according to J.L. Gautam, director of seismology at the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi.
An aftershock of 6.9 walloped Nepal on Sunday.
The jolts have killed at least 5,500 and leveled thousands of buildings and homes, officials said Thursday.
“I have to get home. It has already been so many days,” said Shanti Kumari, with her 7-year-old daughter, who was desperate to see family in her home village in eastern Nepal. “I want to get at least a night of peace.”
Five days after the quake, tent cities in Kathmandu had thinned out, as overnight rainfall persuaded many people to return to their homes, even if they were damaged by the quake.
The streets of the capital were slick with rain Thursday morning and potholes were filled with water.
Still, life in the capital was slowly returning to the way it had been before the quake. Small snack shops were open. At a leather goods shop, a merchant brushed dust from a jacket on display.
A man laid out carpets and rugs beneath an awning at a handicrafts store. Foreigners stood in line at a mobile phone store.
“It’s getting back to normal, but we’re still feeling aftershocks. It still doesn’t feel safe,” said Prabhu Dutta, a 27-year-old banker from Kathmandu.
He said he felt four aftershocks in the morning, including one that rattled the sliding glass doors of the bookshelf in his bedroom — “My morning wakeup notice,” he said.
Dutta has been sleeping in his home, which has some cracks in the wall, for two nights, but the dozens of small aftershocks that he has felt since Saturday’s huge quake make him uneasy.
“I am worried about whether they will continue for a long time or whether it will calm down,” he said.
Gautam of the Indian Meteorological Department said the aftershocks could continue for long periods.
“We can expect aftershocks over the next few weeks, or months, or even years,” he said. “These aftershocks are quite normal after a powerful earthquake of such magnitude.”
There was no way, however, for seismologists to predict when the “next big one” would occur, he said.
Dutta said some people are returning to work, including at his bank, but that it was impossible to concentrate.
“We roam around the office. We only have one topic of conversation: the earthquake,” Dutta said.
Many people in Kathmandu are going to the country fearing that a big aftershock is coming, he said.
On Wednesday, helicopters finally brought food, temporary shelter and other aid to villages northwest of Kathmandu in the mountainous Gorkha district near the epicenter.
Entire clusters of homes there were reduced to piles of stone and splintered wood. Women greeted the delivery with repeated cries of “We are hungry!”
While the death toll in the village of Gumda was low — only five people were killed and 20 injured among 1,300 residents — most had lost their homes and desperately needed temporary shelter, along with the 90-pound sacks of rice that were delivered Wednesday.
Meanwhile, at least 210 foreign trekkers and residents stranded in the Langtang area north of Kathmandu had been rescued, government administrator Gautam Rimal said. The area, which borders Tibet, is popular with tourists.
Police said the official death toll in Nepal had reached 5,489. That figure did not include the 19 people killed at Mount Everest — five foreign climbers and 14 Nepalese Sherpa guides — when the quake caused an avalanche that hit part of the base camp.
Dutta, the banker, said that while many of Kathmandu’s cement and concrete buildings survived with only minor damage, many of the older buildings, made of tile, wood or bricks, have been leveled.
“Things have to return to normal, but it will take time,” he said. “No one is ready to do the work needed to recover because of the closeness of the deaths. There is still shock.”
With staff and wire reports