NEW DELHI, April 25. /TASS/. A minimum of 1,500 people have been killed by an earthquake of 7.8 points on the Richter scale that rocked Nepal on Saturday, the Nepalese police said.
The Interior agencies are coordinating the rescue operations in the Himalayan mountainous country.
Rescuer’s attention is strictly focused now on saving people in the main districts of Kathmandu, TASS was told by Dinesh Acharya, the press secretary of the Interior Department in the Nepalese capital. He believes that the figure of the casualties may grow substantially by Sunday morning.
The buildings that did not have ferroconcrete reinforcing structures suffered the most. The sad fact of reality is that this type of housing dominates across the country.
Rescuers have found the bodies of 200 people under the rubble of Kathmandu’s Dharahara observation tower, a 62-meters-tall structure that was erected in 1832 and listed by UNESCO as a site of global architectural heritage.
Spokespeople for the India Meteorological Department (IMD) told TASS earlier two powerful quakes were registered on Saturday.
The first of them measured 7.9 points on the open-ended Richter scale and occurred at 06:11 UTC. Its epicenter was identified at a pace 80 kilometers to the northwest of Kathmandu and the seismic focus was located at the depth of 10 kilometers below the surface of the earth.
The second quake occurred at 06:45 UTC.
Experts say the overall number of victims may exceed 10,000 in the final run.
The Nepalese authorities have declared the state of emergency in all the parts of the country affected by the quake.
In the meantime, earth crust tremors and quakes continue. A new one was registered at 17:10 UTC. It had the magnitude of 4.7 points and its seismic focus was again located 10 km below the surface of the earth.
Experts have reported fifteen quakes as a minimum, some of them on the Nepalese-Chinese border.