Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake (2022) s01e02 Episode Script

1
Fuck!
Fuck! Fuck!
Fuck!
Everything's uncertain
once the ground shakes.
And in that situation,
you don't have time to think.
You're just trying to make
the next right decision
to save yourself.
And any decision you make
potentially could be the last one.
- Are you okay?
- Huh? Yeah.
- You all right?
- Yeah, yeah.
No, no! Wait, wait! Wait.
- Maybe there's coming more.
- Yeah.
We should get back in the tent.
We should get back
into the tent. Tent!
Tent?
Should we go back into the tent?
Maybe in the kitchen tent?
Let's try it. Stay together.
Stay together.
And we try to find
the kitchen tent.
Oh no, there is no kitchen tent left.
The kitchen tent was
Guys, let's go!
- There's nothing left.
- The kitchen tent is gone.
Fuck!
I guess, um, what we're trying to do now
is ascertain if there's
any people involved.
Um, some injuries.
HRA reported
Took a bit of time to actually
gather my own wits.
First thing I thought about was
you know, our people.
So, there was a bit of a shout around
and just find out,
where is everyone? Are they all good?
And we kind of assessed
the camp, and we had some damage.
The tent where
the medical equipment was in,
our comms tent,
that was the big boss tent,
it was destroyed.
All of my medical supplies,
everything was gone.
It was in that tent,
but everyone was okay.
I ended up getting on the radio,
and the first people I called
were Adventure Consultants.
Anthea, Anthea at AC. From Himex.
And they were further up,
in the middle of main base camp.
- I said
- Nothing heard.
AC, if you need any assistance,
please let us know at Himex.
We have some structure damage,
but we're we've got personnel here.
If you need assistance, let us know.
Just checked in, asked, you know,
how are you guys? You guys all okay?
Um
And they weren't.
Nah, nah. The answer back was no.
We have mass casualties.
Copy that, okay.
Please send any medical
equipment that you have, warm clothing.
We have nothing here.
Copy that. If you have any walking wounded
or even non-wounded,
send them to us,
we have still standing tents and food.
Come down for shelter, if you need.
We'll send people
and medical assistance to you now. Over.
Yeah, copy that.
We'll send everyone from upper base camp
that's walking down your way.
Be prepared, there's a lot.
Yep, copy that.
Yep.
Then routine kicks into line.
- Okay, so
- So next in?
- Yeah, we need attention out at
- Base Camp.
Base Camp for Adventure Consultants.
So we need to send a medical bag,
some boys with sleeping bags.
I have already told them
to send walking wounded to us.
- Right.
- Can we get some food?
Maybe, so just hot soup
or whatever we can do to
- That soup is ready.
- Yep.
So we will be sending them down to
maybe cook tent or white pot,
and they will need food.
- They will need clothing.
- We have food.
The Norwegian camp is gone.
And it's just him,
so I told him if you need shelter
- Dr. Brants, is she around?
- Yeah.
come here. So he'll be back anyway.
Base Camp is your safe zone.
This is where you feel safe,
you expect things on the mountain,
that's what I'm prepared for,
but you don't expect disaster to hit
your safe zone.
Wow!
We were dealing with casualties
in your face.
But, at the time
two thirds of the, um, people
climbers in the region,
were actually higher on the mountain.
Which is, um
quite a scary place to be.
I couldn't get up, I was shaking
so badly that I couldn't get up.
Damian walked up to me
and helped me stand, but I couldn't. Like
my knees and my legs
were shaking so badly.
As soon as he helped me,
I fell back again.
I couldn't breathe.
I was hyperventilating.
And he's like, "Calm down. It's okay.
You're okay. You're okay."
"Don't worry about it. Just breathe."
At that moment,
I became very focused,
very practical, very get things done.
I tell everyone, okay, guys,
we need to get to Camp 1,
we cannot go down to Base Camp.
We need to go to Camp 1,
and then we will assess
the situation from there.
I didn't tell them
that Camp 1 probably is going to be gone.
As we start going up,
radio communication
starts coming from Base Camp.
The Base Camp was hit.
People in Base Camp were worried about us,
and they kept asking,
"Are you okay, are you okay?"
And, like, hearing the voices on the radio
made me realize this is not just here.
It's a lot more than this.
It's the Base Camp
and maybe even beyond Base Camp.
Nepal has been hit
with its worst earthquake in decades.
The biggest earthquake
to strike Nepal in more than 80 years.
The 7.8 earthquake
shook so violently,
witnesses say people jumped out
of buildings to avoid being crushed.
The powerful quake
flattened sections of Kathmandu
and triggered avalanches at Mount Everest.
The quake was felt across that region
from India to China.
And it felt as if the ground
was buckling beneath my feet.
More than 1,500 people
are believed dead,
and that number is climbing.
Rescue workers there have been
desperately digging through the rubble,
searching for any signs of life.
To be frank, nobody was prepared
for the disaster of this scale.
Trust me, not only me,
the Government of Nepal
was not prepared at all.
It was a nightmare.
It was a nightmare.
I was summoned
by, uh, the home home secretary,
and I vividly remember what he said to me.
He said, "Okay, Durga,
you should lead the search and rescue
operation in Kathmandu."
"I want you to swing into action
as soon as you exit from this building."
My question to him was,
"Thank you, sir. I would,
but I don't have
any human resources under me."
"Not only that,
I don't have any tools and equipment
so that I can accomplish
the task that you have given to me."
And he said flatly on my face
"I don't want to listen to nothing,
I just want you to do the job."
So I knew, I mean, this is
this is this is an order,
which has got a lot of challenge.
And I don't know how to start
and where to start from.
The 24-hour window period,
that's the most important time
for search and rescue.
Every second counts.
And I knew
the more delay is going to happen,
the more we made a delay,
the more we are going to extract
the dead bodies,
not the live people or the live victims.
After a while, I woke up.
I felt suffocated and smothered,
like I was locked in a cupboard.
I didn't realize
there were six floors above me.
My throat was dry and sore.
I felt suffocated and smothered,
like I was locked in a cupboard.
I thought about my family.
I missed them,
and thought about my love for them.
That's probably what kept me alive.
I arrived in Kathmandu
and got off at the bus station.
I realized I was completely alone
in the city as I had run away from home.
I wondered about all the tall buildings
and how much it had cost to build them.
I knew a man
who worked in a guest house
and I asked him to find me a job.
He was the one who took me
to Arjun's guest house.
Sangeeta asked me whether
we could hire him as a worker or not.
I asked his name and he told me
that his name was Ramesh.
When I started working there,
me and Pemba were close friends.
The best thing about that life was
we had people like Arjun and Sangeeta
as our employers.
They were not just our employers.
We all slowly became like a family.
Sangeeta was
she was with us most of the time.
I could see her.
She was standing between me and Pemba.
Then the building
started trembling fiercely.
She ran, trying to find
her youngest daughter.
I was running behind her.
But I slipped over the blood
on the stairs.
She was trapped in the lower staircase
and I was in the upper staircase.
Pemba was ahead of us.
After I fell down, I passed out.
I was in such a state of mind that
I thought
I was the only person alive on earth.
I couldn't figure out
if it was all a dream.
I can't even put in words
how how dramatic the devastation was.
What we saw around us was awful.
Houses and roofs collapsed all around us,
snow everywhere.
Snow inside rooms on the second
and third floors of houses.
The village, which just an hour ago
was beautiful and serene,
looked completely ruined.
I'd had my camera next to me
before the earthquake,
and it was still working.
I picked it up and I started
making pictures right away.
At first of
of the buildings and of the damage
but then of the people.
Just
their trying to make sense
of the thing that had just happened.
And trying to figure out what to do next.
I remember
trying to lift a local Nepali woman
who was crying on the ground.
She was crying and sobbing,
but she refused to come with me.
Finding my friends
was what first came to my mind.
I need to be together with them
because we came in as a group.
I am a site engineer
for a company called
Huawei Technologies Nepal.
And that Langtang trip,
it was me from my company,
and there were three other people
from Nepal Telecom.
After the earthquake,
first thing is look for my friends.
So I just shout for one of them.
And lucky for me,
all three of them were okay.
Now all my focus was, oh, now what next?
I kept expecting that someone,
some external force,
some some grown-up
was gonna come
and make everything all right
for all of us.
That's when I first met the Israelis.
There was, like,
an Israeli magnet.
The Israelis just
come in towards the Israeli magnet
and we just formed a group,
and Athena kind of like, uh
kind of joined us.
And from from that moment,
I was documenting everything.
So after we gave
first aid to the injured around us
we had to make a decision.
The first dilemma we have
is stay in Kyanjin Gompa
or to go down, uh
to try and make it to Langtang village.
Kyanjin Gompa is a place that we know.
We can make shelter.
We can get food.
We can survive in this place and make it.
On the other hand,
Langtang village
was the way out of the valley.
At that point, our biggest fear
was another avalanche.
We had just experienced one,
and another could shortly follow.
And our feeling was,
we need to get out of here
as fast as possible.
Sticking together is the way
is the best way to survive
the whole situation.
That's when we make
the decision to go down.
I don't think I stopped
to really imagine at that stage
that it was any worse anywhere else.
It felt very much like something
that had happened to us in that place.
I'd done the surviving, you know,
the the worst had happened.
Knowing what I know now,
that seems terribly naïve.
I am recording,
to celebrate the fact that we're alive.
We made it out alive. We all survived.
All four of us were able
to make it out safely.
Every one of us is like, okay to be alive,
like, thankful to be alive that time.
It's Saturday April 25th
after 12:30 in the afternoon.
There was an earthquake,
and after that a glacier burst.
Everyone had a scary experience.
So now, walking down, we are, like, happy.
Half an hour ago, none of us
expected to survive and walk back.
I was buried but I finally opened my eyes.
I was trying to protect my head.
The snow was pressing down on me.
I was trying to shake off the snow.
Lucky to be alive.
We thought the worst was over,
we are leaving the worst behind.
People come to play
in the snow, today we almost died in it.
The snow covered us today.
Not just snow, a natural disaster.
The snow isn't the scary part,
the falling rocks and stones were scary.
Houses were destroyed and the stones
and iron roofs are scary.
It came like a hurricane. Oh, my God.
And then there was an aftershock.
And we knew there were rocks
on the top of that hill
that could still fall off,
and it could very well hit us again.
That's why I stopped the video
and we started running.
I was down in the snow,
but when I heard the first whistle,
the first whistle and people shouting
my consciousness came back.
At that time,
I was under a thin layer of ice.
When I came round,
it was really hard to breathe.
So I moved my body
and my right elbow broke through the ice.
Then fresh air came in, and I felt alive.
I looked for my tent
because all my clothes were in there,
but it had completely disappeared.
It was totally covered by snow.
Everything had disappeared,
and I was more scared.
I was feeling so cold inside.
Three companies were hit the worst.
One was mine, Dreamers' Destination.
When I picked myself up
there was nothing.
It was totally wiped out.
When I looked for the injured
and the dead from my team
four of them had died on the spot.
It was so messed up,
it was difficult to know
whether they were sleeping bags or bodies.
Can we have some of that?
Or a mattress or anything!
- Mattress.
- Mattress.
- Mattresses?
- Mattress, yeah.
It was very hard
to lose friends like that.
It was very difficult.
Because just a few minutes before,
everything had been fine, but
after that avalanche
everything was destroyed.
The sad thing is
five members of my group
are no longer with us.
Among the dead
was my own brother-in-law,
a fellow Sherpa,
you could hardly recognize him.
He was hurled
50 or 60 meters across the camp.
So sometimes,
I don't believe in God either.
Why does he take good people?
If God was fair,
he should have taken the bad people.
But why does he take a good person?
So sometimes, I think God is also selfish.
At that time,
I didn't know there'd been an earthquake.
I didn't even know what an earthquake was.
The exact moment there was
an earthquake in Kathmandu,
I was lighting a lamp in Shiva's temple
and having a great time.
I went back home after lighting the lamps
and my mother started yelling at me,
"Didn't you know
there's been an earthquake?"
My mother told me
to go straight back to Kathmandu.
Suddenly I had
a bad feeling about my hotel.
I thought "My hotel is really big,
and Sangeeta hasn't called me yet."
So I called her there and then.
She would always answer my phone
on the first ring.
It was ringing for ages,
but she didn't answer.
I started to feel a chill in my body.
Sangeeta was all I had.
I'd only known hardship
since I was a child.
She'd made me forget all those troubles.
Before I met her, I didn't feel human.
After I met her, I became a human being.
She completely changed my life.
Outside a hospital in Nepal,
scenes of chaos
with patients overflowing
into the parking lot outside.
Many are staying outdoors,
in parks and on the streets,
terrified of repeated aftershocks.
Rescuers are desperately
trying to dig people from the rubble.
When I got close, I saw a hotel
had fallen across the road in front of me.
I turned around and came to the ring road.
My place was just across from there.
It was all destroyed.
And then I started shivering and shaking.
"Sangeeta, Sangeeta, Sangeeta."
That's all I could say.
I didn't even think about my children.
Only Sangeeta. Sangeeta. Sangeeta.
Us Israelis, we were walking
down towards Langtang.
That was our destination. We were
hoping to make it to Langtang village.
We were walking for about two hours,
and I hear a sound.
And I look back at Shahar
to kind of, like, see
if he heard it as well,
and then he gives me this confirmation
that he heard it as well.
And then we both go up to try
and find out what that sound is.
And we see this woman
and she's just groaning in pain.
So we called one of the guys
who was a medical, uh, instructor
in his military service.
He takes a look at her and he says,
"Listen, if this woman
doesn't make it to hospital
within an hour,
she probably won't make it.
We also see,
we have to cross this avalanche.
And it was kind of like crossing
a river of ice.
Okay, ice and stone, that's what it was.
We're this woman's only shot
of making it alive
but we understand
that we need to make sure
that we're going to make it alive
out of the situation as well.
We shouldn't leave
anyone injured behind,
is what we were taught
in military service.
It was
a very, very difficult situation.
But we make a decision
that we're going to try and rescue her.
We decide that one person
will take her on his back.
He's walking with her, but she's heavy,
and it's so slippery and it's
so difficult to walk through the ice
that he doesn't really manage
to make any progress.
And then we try
a different way of carrying her.
And it was just impossible to do.
When you saw them
trying to carry this woman,
what did you think?
It's stupid.
We were traveling as a group of 13 people,
and we're crossing
a slushy, rocky, icy river.
That felt really, really,
really dangerous.
A dangerous place to be in, that river.
And with that added variable
I felt insecure and
and, yeah, frightened.
I wanted to get the fuck out of there.
As soon as possible.
But then at some point
that woman died.
As painful as it was,
as difficult as it was,
we thought to ourselves,
we're in the middle of an avalanche.
There's always the danger of
an aftershock, of another earthquake,
that will make the avalanche move again,
make the landslide move again.
So we decided that
the smartest thing to do,
the best thing to do,
was cover her with blankets.
And we just left her there
and walked towards Langtang.
We were surviving,
we were making a survival decision.
We didn't have the privilege
to think of the situation at that time.
We didn't have the privilege
to mourn about it.
We didn't have the privilege
to try and think of the catastrophe.
All that we did in that situation
was survival.
Yep, she's here.
Okay, Anne. We got you.
Um, Mike and Woody
and medical kit is coming.
Can I have, um, er
something warm like a sleeping bag?
I have oxygen.
Yep. Copy. We'll get a sleeping bag.
You have to make constant judgment calls.
If you see people need assistance,
send them to our camp.
We'll have food and sleeping bags.
We knew we weren't expecting
a helicopter to turn up that day.
You're talking about a valley
at 5,300 meters,
20-30 minutes flight time
from the nearest helicopter base at Lukla.
It wasn't very likely.
You know, pilots have
a rule of thumb that, you know,
mountainous regions,
you don't fly into cloud
because the clouds have rocks in them.
So, we had to start turning
our camps and resources
into basic triage stations.
We need manpower, please.
Can we have a lot of people?
- We need some help!
- Stretcher?
- Manpower!
- I know you guys.
It was chaos.
But the whole camp wanted to do something.
Everyone who was there pitched in.
So we started receiving
people on stretchers,
improvised stretchers, ladders, and ropes.
Anything that they could use
to carry someone to our tent.
When I saw the first victim
being brought in,
that's when the penny dropped.
This is not a bunch of walking wounded.
There's more.
There's more to come.
There are people
that have multiple injuries.
People that need to be stretchered.
Head injuries or fractures.
People that need to lay down.
There was so many of them,
we took all the chairs out of the tent
and, um we put beds down.
When the doctor was about to
touch me, I told him I was HIV positive,
so please use precautions.
"You're HIV positive?"
The doctor gave out gloves to everyone
and did all this stuff.
But the thing I found funny
was when they bandaged my head with tape
and wrote "HIV positive" on it.
In reality, at that time, I was in shock.
I thought an avalanche would come again
because of the aftershocks.
And if that happened, I can't run because
I was so injured and unable to walk.
All I could think about was,
I had to get out of there.
Greg, Greg, we've got another.
A more serious head injury
coming your way.
I never had to deal
with so many victims at once.
And we didn't have anything
to treat them with.
So, all we could do is
provide them with supportive care.
Give them something for the pain.
And just wait.
I had one job.
Keeping people alive
until the helicopters arrived.
I couldn't decide if I should
stay awake or close my eyes and let go.
But I didn't close my eyes.
I just wanted to lie there quietly,
but I forced myself to shout
so people might hear me.
Every small hole I saw,
I would shout and then listen carefully.
I could hear people moving above me.
I heard him and shouted,
"Someone is in there!"
So everyone came running.
Some came with hammers, some with drills.
We started smashing it up.
As we kept digging,
we started seeing Ramesh.
There was one slab of concrete left.
There was a small hole in that slab
and I saw light through it.
When I saw through that tiny hole,
I could feel the cool fresh air.
It was an overwhelming experience for me
because I was totally disoriented.
His head was all blue.
His blood was clotted.
We didn't think he would live.
My legs were stuck.
They were trying to yank
my body out, but I asked them to stop.
When I was pulled out,
I was only partially conscious.
When we finally pulled him out,
his legs were just shredded.
But he never cried.
Both his legs were gone,
but, nope, he didn't cry.
Though I didn't cry,
I felt sad then.
I cried inside
seeing that other people were OK,
and they could walk but I couldn't.
He kept saying that Sangeeta
and the children were down there.
"Sangeeta is speaking in here," he said.
And I kept asking him where she was.
"She's under me, she's trapped
in the room below me," he kept saying.
"She's fine, she's still talking."
I still had hope for my family.
If he survived this, I thought,
they must be alive too.
It was about four or five o'clock,
afternoon.
It was getting darker.
And we arrived at this building.
And around the building
gathered a lot of people.
It was
it was sitting on this ridge,
um just above Langtang village.
It had a sense of safety to it,
um and it was solid.
It was was four walls,
and even without a ceiling,
it felt more secure
than being in the open.
People were outside,
talking, all this hustle and noise.
At the beginning, I didn't understand why
they weren't going down to the village.
Langtang was just below us,
so why were they gathering here?
I think I thought,
why are they not going down?
Why are they standing there?
Why are they on this cliff still?
And then they pointed me towards Langtang.
There was a little hill
that looked down on the village.
I walked down to that hill.
It was about 500 meters from the village.
Walking to the ridge
above where the village had been,
and there was nothing there.
I didn't even see a single roof.
There's not
a single house standing.
There's nothing over there.
Everything's gone.
Langtang had been flattened.
It was impossible to imagine
that a village had ever existed there.
Every single house had been wiped out,
only one house under the cliff
was left standing.
You couldn't even tell
that houses had ever been there.
As I climbed down the hill,
the village was deserted.
There was no sign of life,
no birds, no animals.
The village that had been
full of life that morning,
it was completely silent,
like a ghost town.
The first thing I did was visit my home.
But there was no home.
I found four or five dead bodies
on the way.
Those five dead bodies were of locals.
I knew them.
That's all we could think about.
So many had died.
My mother's sister died,
and her husband too.
And their son, and his two small children,
and his wife too.
Also, my cousin,
the daughter of my father's sister,
her husband too.
And their three small sons,
and my father's own sister.
And, of course, my own mother and father.
The situation up the hill
was even more chaotic.
I looked around and saw some of my friends
had their hands broken,
some had their heads broken,
legs broken, their spine fractured.
I talked to them, hugged them.
We were crying together, trying to
work out what had just befallen us.
Everyone was crying.
I wasn't sure if I was dead or alive.
All I could hear is crying.
And as the day went on, there's more
crying and there's more people gathering.
I was just damn scared.
I was scared to the core.
Because then you knew
you had nothing else you could do.
You are kind of helpless.
We could see no way further now.
There's no way across land
and we can't see the trail.
We are stranded here.
I stayed up most of the night.
Um That first night,
I don't think I slept at all.
We couldn't sleep.
That was the longest night for us.
It was terrifying
because the aftershocks kept coming,
and there was nowhere to run.
No, I didn't sleep.
Actually, as I was in trauma,
I thought another avalanche
would be triggered by an aftershock.
And if it happens, I can't run
because I was injured and couldn't walk.
I don't think I was the only one
that quite literally got
into my sleeping bag,
you know, to eventually get some sleep,
with my boots on.
Nobody was going to bed
not prepared to jump up and fully clothed.
We heard the helicopter
come on the first morning.
I felt relief thinking
that now we could leave this place.
The reason I feel lucky
is that when people wrote
I was HIV positive, it hurt me.
But later it became my plus point.
Because instead of taking
severely injured people,
they moved me first,
and I was so grateful.
I felt like, "Oh! I'm going to leave
this place, and now I'll live."
I still feel happy remembering that.
It was just great.
It was just, um
knowing that it could get in
and knowing that we had that link.
And, um
and that we're gonna keep it.
So, um, it it was
it was really it was a game changer.
I'm pretty sure
there are people alive that
wouldn't be without without that.
But then, of course, you have
a bunch of people cut off at Camp 1.
Far less food, far less supplies.
Um
And we have the Khumbu Icefall
between them
and Base Camp.
There were more than 150 people
on the mountain.
And the icefall was gone
and helicopters were being used
to extract people from Base Camp.
So, we find ourself
in a very tough situation.
I felt so powerless.
Everything was out of control.
I felt like a two-year-old
that doesn't know what to do,
how to deal with the situation.
I felt so small, so powerless.
It wasn't a process
of having to convince anybody
of the course of action.
We all felt the same way.
We all felt the climbing route
won't be intact below us.
But it became obvious,
and it became obvious pretty quickly,
that, with the aftershocks,
we weren't going to be able
to take our time and rebuild the route.
Not if the earth was gonna keep shaking.
We were trapped halfway up Mount Everest.
It was very clear
what we needed to survive:
we needed food, water, fire, and shelter.
Going to the village ruins
to search for food and water
seemed the obvious thing to do.
People were hungry
and wanted to go to the village.
I heard my Nepali friends
talking about it.
The guides and porters were talking
about it, and I told them not to go.
Because all the houses
were destroyed in the village
and people's belongings
may have been thrown around by the wind.
A lot of people had died,
so let the relatives recover
their belongings.
We acted
out of survival instinct.
We did what we felt was
the right thing to do.
And the right thing to do is very simple:
stay alive.
I walked down
in the beginning of it, of it all,
to bring back food.
But while I'm searching,
I stumbled onto this box,
this silver
box.
When I approached Yaar,
he was standing near a box
with a couple of friends.
The box was locked.
They said they were wondering whether
to open the box or leave it closed.
There are boxes in a pile that are
you can say, some sort of a safe
and this box was open.
I mean, it wasn't locked.
Shahar said it was locked.
He did?
It might have been.
Eh, what I meant to say was
You know what?
Maybe it was locked, I don't remember.
We broke the lock.
We opened the box.
We found some documents, a camera, photos.
And also some money.
And I thought to myself, well,
if my family member was in those pictures,
I would have wanted
to see it.
And I felt like
me bringing it back to the camp
is the sole and only way that will happen.
So I took it.
If I knew
what it was going to cause
opening that Pandora's box,
it would have never been opened.
In Buddhism, our gurus teach
us the things we must keep in mind:
do not kill people;
do not practice violence;
do not rob and loot;
do not steal from others.