KATHMANDU: A 15-year-old boy was rescued alive after spending 120 hours buried under debris of a collapsed building in Gongabu, giving search and rescue workers a renewed hope today that there are still chances of saving more people.
Pemba Lama Tamang, 15, of Nuwakot was among many people who were either killed or trapped under the wreckage of a seven-storey building that housed four guest houses. The teenager used to be a dishwasher in Hilton Guest House. “I was resting near a counter of the guest house after the morning’s work. All of a sudden the building started shaking and guests, staff and I ran down. But it was too late to escape. The building crumbled and I was trapped in a crater formed by the debris,” he recounted.
Tamang said he spent six days praying and hoping for a new lease of life. “I was lucky that two cans of ghee were lying nearby and I fed on ghee. I found a piece of cloth soaked with rain and squeezed a few drops of water to drink,” he told mediapersons from Israeli Field Hospital set up on the premises of Shree Birendra Hospital, Chhauni.
A special search and rescue team of Armed Police Force backed by the US experts had pulled Tamang out of the debris at around 11.55am after hours of arduous efforts. The rescue workers, led by Inspector Laxman Bahadur Basnet, sensed a peculiar sound from under the debris while using a sniffer dog before they confirmed someone alive there and pulled him out alive.
This triggered a celebration among the APF personnel and onlookers. The APF teams have managed to rescue as many as 330 persons, including 245 in the Kathmandu Valley so far, said DSP Ajaya Chhatkuli.
The jubilant search and rescue workers gave Tamang water and rushed him to the hospital for treatment. An Israeli doctor attending Tamang said none of his family members showed up in the hospital to visit the boy.
Ohad Horsandi, a senior official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel, who is coordinating the hospital management, told THT, “The boy was dehydrated and exhausted but is in high spirits now. He does not have any bodily injuries. It shows that chances of pulling trapped persons alive from debris are still there even after ‘Golden Window’ period, the first 72 hours after the earthquake, is over. I love to call him a Super Hero.” Tamang’s mother works in Kuwait and the boy does not know anything about his father. He came to Kathmandu three years back and worked as a tempo and microbus helper before joining the guest house last month.
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