Contact:

Geno Teofilo
+977 980 377 2588
GTeofilo@habitat.org

Heron Holloway
+63 927 129 6742
HHolloway@habitat.org

Manila, 2 May 2015 – As many families in Nepal continue to struggle to find safe shelter one week after a devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake rocked the region, Habitat for Humanity teams have begun to safely remove rubble, as well as assemble shelter kits to help families left homeless or without adequate shelter.

Many people are sleeping outdoors due to unstable structures and fear of aftershocks. Monsoon season will begin soon in Nepal, making shelter an even more urgent need.

“Many rural communities still have not received any aid at all,” said Rick Hathaway, Asia-Pacific vice president, Habitat for Humanity International. “The needs are overwhelming. The destruction of homes has been so widespread, that one of the greatest needs is shelter. Your support can help Habitat rebuild homes and shelter the survivors from the coming rains.”

As shelter kits are created, items included will vary as needs change. In the immediate days after a disaster, they may contain tarpaulin and other materials for emergency shelter and protection from the elements. At a later stage, the kits may contain wood, roofing materials and tools for home repairs.

According the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, an estimated 2.8 million people have been displaced by the earthquake, and more than 300,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. The U.S. Agency for International Development has listed housing and access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) as two of the priority issues that must be addressed in the early stages of the recovery effort.

Habitat’s ability to respond effectively to this disaster will require support from donors, corporate partners and other community organizations. Donations can be made at habitat.org/donate/nepal.

-ends-

Notes to Editors

To set up interviews, receive photography or further information, please contact Geno Teofilo, +63 +977 980 377 2588, GTeofilo@habitat.org or Heron Holloway, +63 927 129 6742, HHolloway@habitat.org.

About Habitat for Humanity International

Habitat for Humanity International’s vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. Anchored by the conviction that safe and affordable housing provides a path out of poverty, since 1976 Habitat has helped more than 5 million people through home construction, rehabilitation and repairs and by increasing access to improved shelter through products and services. Habitat also advocates to improve access to decent and affordable shelter and offers a variety of housing support services that enable families with limited means to make needed improvements on their homes as their time and resources allow. As a nonprofit Christian housing organization, Habitat works in more than 70 countries and welcomes people of all races, religions and nationalities to partner in its mission. Habitat has supported an estimated 1.5 million individuals in the Asia-Pacific region, where it has been active since 1983. To get more information, to donate or to volunteer, please visit habitat.org/asiapacific or follow us at facebook.com/habitat.

South Asia

Nepal Earthquake

On Saturday 25 April, an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale struck the poor, landlocked and mountainous Asian state of Nepal. By 30 April, the death toll had risen to more than 5,500 and the UN estimates that 8million people across the country are affected by the disaster – more than a quarter of the population.

Oxfam is stepping up its relief effort and aims to support 350,000 people. We have already started working in five districts: Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu valley, and the more remote Gorkha and Sindhupalchwok districts. By the end of this week, teams will reach two other badly affected districts of Dhading and Nuwakot. Urgent activities so far have been trucking in drinking water, constructing temporary toilets, and distributing basic essentials, and we’re making arrangements to get cash out to people and distribute temporary shelters. A bottleneck of people and supplies at Nepal’s Kathmandu airport combined with nationwide fuel shortages, blocked roads and difficult terrain is hampering the efforts of aid agencies and emergency services to reach earthquake survivors. Speaking from Kathmandu, Oxfam's Humanitarian Manager, Orla Murphy, said: “Blocked roads, fuel shortages and supplies being held up at Kathmandu airport pose a big challenge for Oxfam and others. We’re doing everything we can to get our teams to the affected areas to assess what’s needed and get help to vulnerable people who need it as soon as possible.” Continue reading. (Photo 1: A woman pours water into a cooking pan used by her daughter to clean dishes at the Tundikhel IDP camp in Kathmandu, Nepal. Aubrey Wade, Oxfam, April 2015. Photo 2: Technical volunteers, trained by Oxfam during the urban risk management program, erect a water tank at the Tundikhel IDP camp in Kathmandu, Nepal, Aubrey Wade, Oxfam, April 2015)

Samaritan’s Purse is currently responding to the earthquake in Nepal through a 26 person disaster assistance response team (DART) based in Kathmandu and a 9 person DART logistics team based in Delhi, India. We have highlighted six districts in the Kathmandu Valley as the main areas Samaritan’s Purse will respond through non-food item, water sanitation and hygiene, and food distributions. A DART medical team is also working in these districts through partnership with local hospitals as well as mobile medical clinics into hard-to-reach areas in the outlying communities. Below are specific details on this response:

LOGISTICS:

• Warehouse space has been secured in Kathmandu as 42.2 tons of supplies arrived via air charter today – including tents, kitchen sets and blankets for upcoming distribution.

SECURITY:

• The CDO in the Nuwakot district has advised our teams to attempt by all means possible to bring in food or shelter items upon their return to the district.

• There continue to be reports of rising tensions in some areas due to the perception that foreigners are receiving preferential treatment in regard to evacuations and supplies.

• Our team has not experienced any of these tensions during their trips into outlying communities but are remaining vigilant.

ICT:

• The emergency telecommunications cluster meeting was attended today by our team in which we learned a support presence is set up in Gorkha due to the high number of organizations working in that area.

• Installation of VSATs will occur within districts based on the number of organizations once the ETC receives information on where various organizations will be working.

MEDICAL:

• World Health Organization (WHO) preliminary injury assessment from 4 hospitals in the Kathmandu Valley reveal 241 patients with 60% hospitalized for fractures. There are few patients under the age of 5.

• Orthopedic equipment for our DART surgical team has arrived in Kathmandu.

• Work continues at Anandaban Hospital where our orthopedic surgeon conducted various surgeries today.

WASH:

• Additional WASH assessments occurred today and future plans are to put together latrine cleaning kits for urban Kathmandu where there are still displaced people sleeping in tents at night.

• Urban WASH response began today with the first delivery of latrine cleaning kits plus water purification kits.

NFI & Shelter:

• NFI kit composition agreed upon in Cluster meeting and Samaritan’s Purse identified as Shelter and NFI lead in Nuwakot and Rasuwa districts.

FOOD:

• 18 tons of food was distributed today reaching 500 households.

Today’s report is a summary of only new items posted since our last situation report. Our live situation report can be accessed at http://humanityroad.org/apr25nepalquake/

UNOCHA reports that a scale-up of operations is required to ensure immediate and principled assistance reaches people in desperate need within the next six weeks, in advance of the monsoon season. Shelter remains the most critical need in the affected areas. A humanitarian hub was established in Gorkha to support response at the district level. According to the Government, the death toll from the earthquake increased to 6,250 people with 14,357 injured people. 15 lives have been saved, including three in the past 24 hours. (source)

Todays’ Humanity Road report focuses on three special updates.
1. Medical: Updated overview, medical needs and information updates from medical teams
2. Communities in Need – includes some information from KLL map which now has 946 reports
3. Current Status of Hikers in Langtang/Mt. Everest and Lukla Airport (new item on sitrep)
4. An updated 3W report for aid agencies responding prepared by Standby Task force (source)

Please visit the following sites daily for disaster response updates
Reliefweb: http://reliefweb.int/disaster/eq-2015-000048-npl
Humanitarian Response http://www.humanitarianresponse.info/operations/nepal

HIGHLIGHTS

• The Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED) distributes plastic sheeting provided by USAID/OFDA1 to earthquake-affected households in Kathmandu District’s Sankhu village and surrounding areas.

• The USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Humanitarian Assessment Survey Team (JHAST) are working with Nepalese authorities and relief organizations in Nepal to determine needs for logistical support.

Nepal Earthquake - Fact Sheet #5 Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 (as of May 1, 2015)

KATHMANDU, 2 May 2015 – One week on from the earthquake in Nepal, UNICEF says the health and wellbeing of children affected by the disaster are hanging in the balance – as many have been left homeless, in deep shock and with no access to basic care. With the monsoon season only a few weeks away, children will be at heightened risk of diseases like cholera and diarrhoeal infections, as well as being more vulnerable to the threat of landslides and floods.

“The earthquake has caused unimaginable destruction,” said Rownak Khan, UNICEF Deputy Representative in Nepal. “Hospitals are overflowing, water is scarce, bodies are still buried under the rubble and people are still sleeping in the open. This is a perfect breeding ground for diseases.”

The April 25 earthquake flattened more than 130,000 homes and left 3 million people in need of food assistance. Some 24,000 people are currently staying in 13 camps in Kathmandu. In a country where just over 40 per cent of children are stunted, fears for children’s nutrition are rising. At least 15,000 children with severe acute malnutrition require therapeutic feeding. There is also an urgent need for children in the 12 most affected districts to get back to their normal routine by setting up child-friendly spaces, opening schools and providing access to basic services, such as health and water.

As soon as the earthquake struck one week ago, UNICEF used its pre-positioned relief supplies to mount an emergency response and was able to provide aid, including tents to serve as emergency clinics at hospitals, tarpaulin for shelter, water trucking services in informal camps, water purification tablets and hygiene kits.

UNICEF is broadening its response so that children in the most severely affected communities, including those in hard-to-reach areas beyond Kathmandu, are provided with lifesaving services and supplies.

"We have a small window of time to put in place measures that will keep earthquake-affected children safe from infectious disease outbreaks – a danger that would be exacerbated by the wet and muddy conditions brought on with the rains," said Khan. “That’s why it’s so crucial to get essential medicine, medical equipment, tents and water supplies out to these areas now.”

In the past week, UNICEF has:

• Flown in more than 85 tons of aid, including tents, plastic sheeting, blankets and life-saving medicines.Set up child friendly spaces in informal camps, to offer support to help children recover from their experiences, as well as a safe place where they can play and learn.

• Delivered aid to remote areas outside the Kathmandu valley – including in Kavre and Gorkha districts, where UNICEF teams provided thousands of people with soap, water purification tablets, tarpaulins and buckets. In Dhading district, hygiene and family kits and water purification tablets have been dropped to seven remote villages using helicopters.

• Set up psychological support services in Gorkha, Kaski, Sindhuli, Kavre, Ramechhap and Kathmandu.

On Saturday live on-air programmes begin on national radio aimed at providing life-saving information and also expert counselling for children, women and families living in remote parts of the districts hit by the earthquake. The programmes will be aired four times throughout the day.

UNICEF has launched a US$50 million appeal to support its humanitarian response to the earthquake in Nepal for the next three months.

Lending his voice to the children of Nepal, UNICEF Ambassador Orlando Bloom, who has visited Nepal twice with UNICEF, has recorded an appeal urging support for UNICEF's emergency efforts. The video can be accessed here.

Please donate at www.supportunicef.org/nepal

Photos and video can be downloaded here: http://uni.cf/1HH6SbO

Interviews are available with UNICEF staff working on the emergency response.

About UNICEF

UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere. For more information about UNICEF and its work visit: www.unicef.org

Follow UNICEF on Twitter and Facebook

For further information and interview requests, please contact:

Rupa Joshi, UNICEF Nepal, + 977 9851054140 rjoshi@unicef.org

Rose Foley, UNICEF New York (currently in Nepal), +1917 340 2582, rfoley@unicef.org

Kent Page, UNICEF New York (currently in Nepal), +19173021735, kpage@unicef.org

Chris Tidey, UNICEF New York, +1 917 909 9542, ctidey@unicef.org

5/2/2015 - 03:06 GMT

by Bhuvan BAGGA

Nepal ruled out the possibility Saturday of finding more survivors buried in the rubble from a massive earthquake that killed more than 6,700 people and devastated vast swathes of one of Asia's poorest countries.

One week on from Nepal's deadliest quake in over 80 years, hopes of detecting more signs of life among the ruins of the capital Kathmandu had all but disappeared and the focus was shifting to reaching survivors in far-flung areas who have yet to receive relief supplies.

The UN children's fund UNICEF warned of a race against time to avert an outbreak of disease among the 1.7 million youngsters estimated to be living in the worst-hit areas, with monsoon rains just a few weeks away.

The 7.8-magnitude quake wreaked a trail of death and destruction when it erupted around midday last Saturday, reducing much of Kathmandu to rubble and even triggering a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.

"It has already been one week since the disaster," home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal told AFP.

"We are trying our best in rescue and relief work but now I don't think that there is any possibility of survivors under the rubble."

As well as updating the death toll to 6,621, Dhakal put the number of injured at 14,023.

While multiple teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble, no one has been pulled alive since Thursday evening.

More than 100 people were also killed in neighbouring India and China.

The exact scale of the disaster was still to emerge, with the mountainous terrain in the vast Himalayan nation complicating the relief effort.

The numbers of foreigners who have died was also unclear with around 1,000 EU citizens still unaccounted for in Nepal, according to diplomats.

• Missing Europeans -

The Europeans had mostly been climbing in the Everest region or trekking in the remote Langtang range in the Himalayas near the quake epicentre.

"They are missing but we don't know what their status is," EU ambassador to Nepal Rensje Teerink told reporters, confirming that 12 EU citizens are known to have died so far.

Another EU official said on condition of anonymity that the majority were likely to be found safe, but given the difficulty of the terrain and poor communications, their whereabouts were currently unknown.

Rameshwor Dangal, joint secretary of Nepal's National Disaster Management Division, said many people were waiting to either receive emergency aid supplies or else be airlifted to safety.

"In many areas people are not getting relief and it is natural that they are unhappy about it," he told AFP.

"We estimate that there may still be around 1,000 people in Sindhupalchowk and Rasuwa areas who need to be rescued. This includes the injured and the stranded people, including the foreigners."

AFP journalists who reached part of Sindhupalchowk on Friday reported scenes of utter devastation.

"Almost every house in my village is destroyed, and 20 people died. We lost our cattle and our sheep," said Kumar Ghorasainee, amid the ruins of his hometown of Melamchi.

The 33-year-old English teacher said the school had collapsed and there was nowhere for the children to go.

"No one has come to help us -- the cars and the aid trucks just drive by... How will we manage now?"

In Melamchi, shops and restaurants were closed and streets were mainly deserted.

In nearby rice-farming communities, almost all the houses had been so severely damaged that they were no longer habitable, and locals were sleeping in makeshift tents.

• Disease fears -

The Nepalese government has acknowledged being overwhelmed but the UN's humanitarian chief defended its performance.

"The scale and devastation wreaked by the earthquake and the aftershocks would have challenged any government," Valerie Amos said on Friday.

UNICEF said the health and wellbeing of children affected by the disaster were "hanging in the balance" as so many had been left homeless, in deep shock and with no access to basic care.

"Hospitals are overflowing, water is scarce, bodies are still buried under the rubble and people are still sleeping in the open. This is a perfect breeding ground for diseases," said Rownak Khan, UNICEF's deputy representative in Nepal.

"We have a small window of time to put in place measures that will keep earthquake-affected children safe from infectious disease outbreaks, a danger that would be exacerbated by the wet and muddy conditions brought on with the rains," added Khan.

bur-co/jah

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

OVERVIEW

7.8 magnitude

A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on 25 April at 11:56 local time causing large scale damage. The epicenter is located 81 km northwest of the Nepali capital Kathmandu at a depth of 15km. Hundreds of aftershocks reported including a 6.7 magnitude earthquake. The Government of Nepal requested international humanitarian assistance to the UN Resident Coordinator on 26 April.

Highlights

• UNICEF and partners are now present and delivering results for children in 6 out of 12 severely affected districts. (NEOC/MOHA)

• UNICEF Nepal Country Office has already received 60% of the required supplies for rapid response. Tents, tarpaulins, hygiene kits, and medical kits and supplies have arrived and distribution has begun in the field.

• As of 1 May, UNICEF has reached 86,202 people in three districts (Kavrepalanchok, Lalitpur and Kathmandu) with sufficient quantity of water of appropriate quality for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene.

• Through education and protection clusters, 10 Child-Friendly Spaces have been set-up for the benefit of 1,000 displaced children in Kathmandu Valley.