Rescuers pull survivor from rubble 5 days after Nepal quake

By: 10 years ago

Pemba Tamang is carried on a stretcher after being rescued by Nepalese policemen and U.S. rescue workers from a building that collapsed five days ago in Kathmandu, Nepal, Thursday, April 30, 2015. Crowds cheered Thursday as a Tamang was pulled, dazed and dusty, from the wreckage of a seven-story Kathmandu building that collapsed around him five days ago when an enormous earthquake shook Nepal. AP

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Crowds cheered Thursday as a teenage boy was pulled, dazed and dusty, from the wreckage of a seven-story Kathmandu building that collapsed around him five days ago when an enormous earthquake shook Nepal.

The boy, who has not been identified, was carried out in a stretcher. His face was covered in dust, and medics had put an IV drop into his arm. A blue brace had been placed around his neck. He appeared stunned, and his eyes blinked in the sunlight.

An American disaster response team had been working for a few hours to try to free the trapped boy.

“He’s not too far down, but the floors have collapsed and he’d pancaked between them,” Andrew Olvera, who is heading the team from the U.S. Agency for International Development, said shortly before the boy was freed.

Only twisted ropes of steel rebar was all that was holding huge concrete slabs from falling onto the scene. Two concrete floors were hanging down in front like curtains.

“The whole operation is dangerous,” he said. “But its risk versus gain. To save a human life, we’ll risk almost anything.”

It was a rare bit of good news in a city that has known little but despair since the earthquake hit on Saturday, leaving more than 5,500 people dead across this poverty-wracked Himalayan nation.