ITANAGAR, India — Helicopter teams began evacuating critically injured climbers at Mount Everest’s base camp on Sunday morning, but the effort came to an abrupt halt when a significant new aftershock triggered more avalanches and fears of additional casualties at the world’s highest peak.
ITANAGAR, India — Helicopter teams began evacuating critically injured climbers at Mount Everest’s base camp on Sunday morning, but the effort came to an abrupt halt when a significant new aftershock triggered more avalanches and fears of additional casualties at the world’s highest peak.
Dozens of climbers remain trapped on the side of the mountain at two camps that sit above where the avalanche fell, climbers said in tweets and posts on social media. Ropes and other equipment left in place to help them descend had been swept away in Saturday’s avalanche.
Daniel Mazur, a climber trapped at Camp 1, tweeted Sunday “Aftershock 1 pm! Horrible here in camp 1 Avalanches on 3 sides. C1 [Camp 1] a tiny island. We worry about the icefall team below. Alive?”
Col. Rohan Anand, a spokesman for the Indian army, which had a mountaineering team training on Everest at the time of the disaster, said the rescue effort has been hampered by communications difficulties and weather as well as the aftershock. The tremor occurred around 1 p.m. Nepal time Sunday and registered 6.7 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The army said that 19 had died at the Everest base camp Saturday after an enormous sweep of ice, rocks and snow tumbled toward the camp in an avalanche triggered by Nepal’s deadly earthquake, which has killed more than 2,000 in the country so far. They rescued 61 climbers, mostly foreign tourists.
The wind that accompanied the avalanche “completely pulverized and blew the camp away,” American climber Jon Kedrowski, who was at the base camp, wrote on his blog Sunday. “Many of the injuries were similar to ones you might see in the Midwest when a tornado hits, with contusions and lacerations from flying debris. Head injuries, broken legs, internal injuries, impalements also happened to people. Some people were picked up and tossed across the glacier for a hundred yards.
“People in tents were wrapped up in them, lifted by the force of the blast and then slammed down onto rocks, glacial moraine and ice on the glacier.”
Rescue helicopters had begun to land at the base camp — which is used by hundreds of climbers as the starting point for Everest ascents during peak climbing season — in the morning after the weather cleared and the sun peeped through the clouds. This gave rescuers an opportunity to ferry about 50 of the most critically wounded — climbers and sherpas, their Nepali guides — to safety.
Xinhua News Agency reported that more than 400 mountaineers on the north side of Mount Everest were safe, quoting the sports administration of Tibet. There was an avalanche near the north side of the North Col, but it didn’t hit any of them.
But the continued seismic activities halted rescue operations.
A Danish climber, Carsten Lillelund Pedersen, wrote in a Facebook message exchange with The Washington Post that the injured have been evacuated but that the dead remain.
“It’s very tragic, we have many climbers and sherpas stuck higher up in camp 1 and 2… . And they are getting desperate,” he wrote in the message.
One section was especially hard hit, a Dutch climber named Eric Arnold wrote on his blog. “There was hardly anything left. I see very personal stuff, a log book, shampoo, slippers, reading glasses, everything.”
More than 1,500 people can inhabit Everest base camp at any point during peak climbing season, including climbers, sherpa guides, porters and other staff, said Eric Johnson, a Montana emergency surgeon who sits on the board of Everest ER, which runs a clinic there. It’s difficult to know how many climbers are trapped on the mountain — or how many may have perished during the avalanche near or in its perilous Khumbu icefall, Johnson said.