Helicopters ferry injured from Nepal villages near epicenter

Helicopters crisscrossed the mountains above a remote district today near the epicenter of the weekend earthquake in Nepal that killed more than 4,400 people, ferrying the injured to clinics and taking emergency supplies back to villages cut off by landslides.
Around noon, two helicopters brought in eight women from Ranachour village, two of them clutching babies to their breast, and a third heavily pregnant.
"There are many more injured people in my village," said Sangita Shrestha, who was pregnant and visibly downcast as she got off the helicopter. She was quickly surrounded by Nepalese soldiers and policemen and ushered into a waiting van to be taken to a hospital.

The little town of Gorkha, the district's administrative and trading center, is being used as a staging post to get rescuers and supplies to those remote communities after Saturday's magnitude-7.8 quake.
Some women who came off the helicopters were grimacing and crying in pain and unable to walk or speak, in agony three days after being injured in the quake.
Sita Karki winced when soldiers lifted her. Her broken and swollen legs had been tied together with crude wisps of hay twisted into a makeshift splint.

"When the earthquake hit, a wall fell on me and knocked me down," she said. "My legs are broken."

After an hour of dark clouds gathering and threatening rain, the wind kicked up in Gorkha and sheets of rain began to pour down.
Geoff Pinnock of the UN's World Food Program was leading a convoy of trucks north toward the worst affected areas when the rain began to pound, leaving them stuck.
"This rain has caused a landslide that has blocked my trucks. I can maybe get one truck through and take a risk driving on the dirt, but I think we'll have to hold the materials back to try to get them out tomorrow by helicopter," he said.

Aid workers who had reached the edges of the epicenter described entire villages reduced to rubble.
"In some villages, about 90 per cent of the houses have collapsed. They're just flattened," said Rebecca McAteer, an American physician who rushed to the quake zone from the distant Nepal hospital where she works.
And yet, the timing of the earthquake, near midday, when most rural people are working in the fields, meant most villagers were spared of injuries when buildings collapsed, she said. So far, police say they have 373 confirmed deaths in Gorkha district.