1.15 p.m. (0700 GMT)
Foreign tourists in Nepal are getting anxious as food, water and power remain scarce. Hotel rooms are in short supply too so Pierre-Anne Dube, a 31-year-old from Quebec, has been sleeping on the sidewalk outside a hotel. Friends had been staying there for the first two days so she could use the bathroom and shower there. But they have checked out.
Like many others she’s scared and wants to get out on the first flight she can get.
“We can’t reach the embassy. We want to leave. We are scared. There is no food. We haven’t eaten a meal since the earthquake and we don’t have any news about what’s going on.”
She had just returned from a trek to Everest base camp, which had been the “best experience of her life,” but living the experience of the massive earthquake was definitely the “worst.”
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal.
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1.15 p.m. (0700 GMT)
The Israeli military said it is sending a search and rescue crew to Nepal on Monday to help locate survivors in the rubble, set up a medical field hospital for locals, and bring Israeli travellers home. A total of 260 Israeli military personnel are travelling to Nepal for the mission.
The military says about 150 Israeli travellers have yet to establish contact after the earthquake and are believed to be missing.
“The idea is to arrive and to try to establish communication with them,” said Col. Yoram Laredo, head of the Israeli military mission.
In addition, Israel’s emergency response service, Magen David Adom, is flying home a group of 18 Israelis who travelled to Nepal to receive babies born to Nepalese surrogate mothers, spokesman Zaki Heller said.
– Daniel Estrin, Jerusalem, Israel
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1.00 p.m. (0645 GMT)
International aid agency Oxfam says it is is gearing up to deliver clean water and sanitation supplies to thousands of Nepalis now left homeless. They estimate that some 30,000 people are currently living in makeshift shelters in 16 government camps, too scared to return to their homes for fear of aftershocks.
“We are managing to reach out to people in Kathmandu, but it is extremely difficult to provide support on a larger scale to the most affected areas – a lot of the main roads have been damaged,” said Cecilia Keizer, Oxfam country director in Nepal.
“Our staff is still checking on their families and the partners we work with. At the moment, all the death count reports are coming from Kathmandu Valley. Sadly, I fear that this is only the beginning,” she said.
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11.45 a.m. (0600 GMT)
There’s a lot that the world still doesn’t really know about the Nepal quake.
The key thing is this: How significant is the destruction in Gorkha district, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the capital and the location of the quake’s epicenter? Roads to the area, difficult on good days, are damaged. Learning about the level of destruction and human toll in the vulnerable mountain villages there could change the whole picture.
Here’s an assessment by Matt Darvas, a member of the aid group World Vision:
“Villages like this are routinely affected by landslides,” he says, “and it’s not uncommon for entire villages of 200, 300, up to 1,000 people to be completely buried by rock falls.”
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11.20 a.m. (0540 GMT)
Jagdish Pokhrel, the clearly exhausted army spokesman, says nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army is involved in rescue operations.
“90 per cent of the army’s out there working on search and rescue,” he said. “We are focusing our efforts on that, on saving lives.”
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal
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11.15 a.m. (0530 GMT)
Fears are growing that thousands of people may remain cut off in isolated, devastated mountain villages.
Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha district where Saturday’s quake was centred, says he is in desperate need of help.
“Things are really bad in the district, especially in remote mountain villages. There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I have had reports of villages where 70 per cent of the houses have been destroyed,” he said when contacted by telephone. “We have been calling for help, but we haven’t received enough from the central government.”
He says 223 people had been confirmed dead in the district but he presumed “the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured.”
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal
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11.00 a.m. (0515 GMT)
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says Australia has dispatched a 9-person crisis response team that is scheduled to arrive in Kathmandu later Monday and “will assist in establishing the safety and welfare of Australians currently unaccounted for” after Saturday’s earthquake. She says the team will also assist with humanitarian assessments to support Nepal’s government and the international relief efforts.
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11.00 a.m. (0515 GMT)
New Zealand is sending 37 urban search and rescue experts to Kathmandu. They are scheduled to leave Monday evening. Included are experts in rubble-pile rescues and technical rescues, as well as a structural engineer, a doctor, and paramedics.
New Zealand is also contributing 1 million New Zealand dollars ($761,000) to the relief effort.
Officials have made contact with over 200 New Zealanders in Nepal and are seeking contact with others. They say they have no reason to believe at this point that any New Zealanders died in the earthquake.
– Nick Perry, Wellington, New Zealand
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10.15 a.m (0430 GMT)
On Monday morning, some pharmacies, groceries and shops selling basic provisions opened while bakeries began offering fresh bread. Long lines of people desperate to secure fuel formed outside gasoline stations. Fuel prices remained the same as they were before the quake.
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal
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10.15 a.m. (0430 GMT)
A sense of eerie calm and uneasiness hangs over the capital, Kathmandu, as the aftershocks keep coming for a third day after the massive quake on Saturday. People are still trying to absorb what’s happening to them and their city. Part of their anxiety appears to be fueled by a near complete absence of any real information.
Power lines are down and there is almost no Internet connectivity. Phone connections are spotty at best. Most people are camped outdoors so even where there is limited power back up there’s no TV news to watch. This has made them anxious to buy newspapers every morning.
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal
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10 a.m. (0415 GMT)
Near Kathmandu’s famed Dharahara Tower, reduced to an enormous pile of red brick dust, dozens of people were clambering around the debris clicking smiling selfies and photos of their friends posing.
“This is earthquake tourism. This is not right,” said 21-year-old business student Pawan Thapa who arrived from the suburbs to see how he could help. “They are more interested in clicking their selfies than understanding that it is a tragedy.”
– Katy Daigle, Kathmandu, Nepal
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10 a.m. (0415 GMT)
Facebook has activated its “Safety Check” feature in response to the earthquake in Nepal. The feature, launched in October, allows users to tell friends and family they are safe if they are in the middle of a disaster area.
Facebook engineers in Japan started development on the feature after the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The Kathmandu earthquake was one of the first natural disasters where it has been used.
Google, which lost an employee in an avalanche as a result of the earthquake, has activated its own disaster tool called “Person Finder” http://google.org/personfinder/2015-nepal-earthquake/ and is updating satellite imagery to help with relief efforts. Google is also donating $1 million toward relief efforts, the company said.
– Brad Foss, Washington DC
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9.45 a.m. (0400 GMT)
Japan says it will provide emergency relief goods such as tents and blankets worth 25 million yen ($210,000) to Nepal, through the Japan International Cooperation Agency following the massive earthquake on Saturday.
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9.30 a.m. (0345 GMT)
In Kathmandu, those who came to help are frightened, too. Kathmandu district chief administrator Ek Narayan Aryal says tents and water are being handed at 10 locations in Nepal’s capital, but that the many aftershocks were leaving everyone jittery.
He says that “even the rescuers are scared and running because of them.”
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9.30 a.m. (0345 GMT)
There’s a bottleneck in the efforts to get relief to Nepal. The good news: Kathmandu’s airport is open. The bad news: It’s been a bumpy, frustration-filled experience for those arriving. The second bit of good news: Some aid vehicles have been able to travel overland from Indian to the stricken Nepalese city of Pokhara.
Ben Pickering, Save the Children’s humanitarian adviser in Britain, calls that a positive sign. He emphasizes this, though: “The airport opening is a small miracle.”
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8.45 a.m. (0300 GMT)
Nepal’s Deputy Inspector General of Police Komal Singh Bam says at least 3,218 people have been confirmed killed in Saturday’s earthquake. So far 18 people have also been confirmed dead in an avalanche that swept through the Mount Everest base camp in the wake of the earthquake. Another 61 people were killed in neighbouring India.
_ Binaj Gurubacharya, Kathmandu, Nepal
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8.30 a.m. (0245 GMT)
In a western part of Kathmandu, dozens of Nepali soldiers and Indian rescue workers pulled 16 bodies and one survivor from a collapsed green, three-story building that housed a church. Officials say a Christian meeting was being held on the second floor when the quake hit on Saturday.
One Indian national disaster response force, who did not want to be named, said “I really doubt anybody is alive here, but we have to keep trying and look.”
The bodies were laid out, side by side, on a tarp, as crowds of onlookers were kept behind police tape. Several generators were set up to power the drills and saws used to dig through the building. Several other buildings in the area were damaged, but most appeared fine.
