01x02 - No Way Out

[bunniefuu]

f*ck!

f*ck! f*ck!

f*ck!

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.

f*ck!

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 f*ck 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 k*ll people;

do not practice violence;

do not rob and loot;

do not steal from others.