Nepal Teenager Is Rescued From Rubble Five Days After Earthquake

KATMANDU, Nepal — Five days had passed since an earthquake devastated Nepal, and rescue teams had largely given up hope of finding anyone else alive among the piles of brick and broken concrete in Katmandu. Then on Thursday, in a part of the city dense with cheap hotels and shops, rescuers turned off a mechanical shovel and — in the relative silence — heard a cry.

In the mess lay a 15-year-old hotel worker, Pemba Tamang. A team of rescuers from the United States offered the Nepali crew a camera that was snaked through the debris. It showed the teenager trapped under a metal shutter. A concrete slab was poised above him — held up by a flattened motorcycle.

“He was trapped in a 2.5 foot tall by 3.5 foot wide area behind the motorcycle,” said Chris Schaff, a battalion chief with the Fairfax County Fire Department from Virginia who was on the American team. “He wasn’t being crushed; he was just pinned.”

The problem was that the concrete slab was unstable and a threat not only to the teenager, but to the rescuers themselves, since it hung over the area where the men had to dig.