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A teen boy is rescued by
the Armed Police Force from the collapsed Hilton Hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Photo: Reuters
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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.
Pemba Tamang was carried
out on a stretcher, his face was 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 his eyes blinked in the sunlight.
Nepalese rescuers, with
support from an American disaster response team, had been working for hours to
free Tamang, who police said was 18 years old.
AP reports:
L.B. Basnet, the police
officer who crawled into a gap in the rubble to reach Tamang, 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."
Rescuers eventually used
jacks to lift the concrete slabs that had wedged him in, said Basnet.
An American disaster
response team had been helping the Nepalese.
"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.
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.
"The whole operation
is dangerous," Olvera said. "But it's risk versus gain. To save a
human life, we'll risk almost anything."
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-wracked
Himalayan nation.
Asked how Tamang had lasted
for so many days, Basnet replied: "He survived by good faith."
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