Desperate search for survivors unfolding in Nepal
KATHMANDU, Nepal - The death toll from the earthquake in Nepal has climbed to more than 4,000, including at least four Americans. In Kathmandu Monday, people worked frantically, digging through mountains of rubble with shovels and even their bare hands. One man was found alive, after a search team tunneled through the wreckage to where he was trapped.
Volunteer rescue worker Balram Galtaum hopes they will find other survivors, but knows they may only discover more bodies.
"We don't have the proper tools for this, and whatever we have we just doing with our hands" said Galtaum. "If we can save somebody's life or do some contribution, that's what we are looking for."
The quake struck just before midday on Saturday. From the air, you can see Nepal's historic capital, now pockmarked with flattened buildings. And there have been dozens of aftershocks, jolting a country that is already on edge.
Tens of thousands of people are still sleeping in makeshift camps -- some of them now homeless, but others are simply fearful that the aftershocks could bring more buildings down on top of them.
In an overcrowded hospital we visited, where doctors are struggling to treat the wounded, we met Yaguar Atkari, whose home was demolished by the quake. Despite his fractured spine he is alive. The rest of his family, his wife and 5-year-old son, didn't make it.
"We were three," said Atkari. "And I lost both of them."
They are already cremating the dead in Kathmandu, lighting funeral pyres for thousands of people, including for the father of a young girl we came across.
Search and rescue teams and medical teams have been arriving in Nepal but a lot of international help has been slowed down and even turned away because Khatmandu's airport, which suffered damage, is too small to cope with all the traffic. The fear is that there may be many more dead and inured in remote villages that are still cut off from help.