China Harbin Personnel Sent to Nepal for Rescue Work

China sent a team of relief workers from the city of Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, to neighboring Nepal to give a helping hand by distributing goods and rescuing victims from the rubble in Kathmandu, the capital.

Zhao Hongliang, head of the team, said that, while there have been no quakes in major quake zones, there are still possible aftershocks or other dangers, such as diseases that call for prevention.

Zhao and his team have been dispatched to a small town 100 kilometers from Kathmandu, where they had to dig people out of the rubble collapsed buildings, and, in his words, have been “looking for survivors as early as possible and dealing with the bodies of victims to avoid outbreaks of diseases”.

And, landslides and avalanches have made the work difficult, and the Harbin crews have had to search overnight for three days to find as many bodies as they can and can only take brief naps before returning to work.

Zhao says he won’t forget one experience where they dug the body of a little girl out of the rubble in a town 30 kilometers from Kathmandu, and later learned that six of the 8-year-old girl’s family members had died in the quake and only two were left alive, and, “That tragedy can be seen almost every day here.”

In addition to their routine work, the Harbin crew also helped bandage the wounded legs of five girls on the way back to the base camp and gave them some antiseptic.

The team is a branch of the national Blue Sky Rescue team, who have brought much-needed life-saving equipments and materials to quake-stricken areas in Nepal.

Dozens of countries have sent rescue crews to Nepal, including the United States, France, Germany, Britain and Israel because of the dire nature of the situation. The Harbin crew, and 11 colleagues, returned to China, on May 3.