Death toll rises from Nepal earthquake

Authorities feared the death toll would rise due to lack of contact with the mountainous region near the epicenter of the magnitude 5.6 earthquake, which was 42 kilometers south of Nepal’s Jumla region.

“The number of injuries may be in hundreds and deaths may also rise,” Jajarkot district official Harish Chandra Sharma told Reuters by phone.

Police spokesman Kuber Kadayat said 92 people were killed in Jajarkot in Karnali province and 36 in the neighboring Rukum West district. While a Prime Minister’s official claimed that at least 85 people were injured in Rukum West and 55 in Jajarkot, Sharma said there were at least 50 people in hospitals in Jajarkot alone.

“Many houses collapsed and cracks appeared in others,” Sharma said. “Thousands of residents spent all night in cold, open fields because they were too afraid to enter cracked houses when the aftershocks hit,” she said.

Officials said search and rescue teams in mountainous regions, together with villagers, removed bodies and injured people from collapsed houses, stressing that roads were closed and some villages could not be reached due to floods. ground slides.

Authorities said the death toll was expected to rise in the morning and noted that communications with many villages were cut.

Nepal’s National Earthquake Research and Monitoring Center measured the earthquake’s magnitude at 6.4.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) measured the magnitude of the earthquake at 5.6.
The National Center for Seismology (NCS) of India reported in its Facebook post that the earthquake had a magnitude of 6.4 and a depth of 10 kilometers.

Indian news agency ANI News said the tremors were also felt in India’s national capital region of Delhi and some northern regions of the country.

The earthquake was the deadliest since 2015, when nearly 9,000 people died. At that time, entire towns, centuries-old temples and other historical sites were reduced to rubble, and more than a million houses were destroyed. (AA, REUTERS)