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Hopes fade of finding more survivors
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Rescue workers raced against time and plucked a 90-year-old woman alive from the debris of India's worst earthquake in Bhuj on Monday but hopes were fading of finding more survivors as the stench of rotting bodies raised concerns about the outbreak of disease.
The old lady, named Cham Paten Seth, had survived because her head was protected by an old sewing machine. She had been calling out and Sikh soldiers used their hands and crowbars to dig her out.
As she emerged, asking for water, she said that she had heard the voices of two more people alive under the rubble.
Survivors in Bhuj queued before giant cauldrons from which aid workers served rice and a lentil curry.
In nearby Anjar, where some 350 children aged between five and 12 were crushed under rubble while on a Republic Day parade, many people felt abandoned by the government which they said left them without help in the immediate aftermath.
Ahdhra Haryana Khatri, a Muslim man wearing a red scarf standing on top the compacted rubble repeated, “This is my home. this is my home. My wife is still here.” He had been out of the city when the earthquake struck.
“It's obviously a major, major earthquake comparable to Armenia in 1988 and Turkey in 1999,'' British rescuer Andy Burns told reporters.
“If one talks in terms of loss of human life, then one is looking at perhaps 100,000 people at the moment,” Defence Minister George Fernandes told British Broadcasting Corp.
But Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya said the state government still estimated the toll at between 15,000 and 20,000.
2 Americans killed
An American woman and her daughter are among the thousands who died in the earthquake, a US State Department official said on Monday.
“So far, those are the only known American casualties,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. “We have sent our condolences to this family. And, of course, we extend our condolences to all of the families of victims of this horrible tragedy.”
Boucher did not reveal the identity of the victims because of the federal privacy act.
The United States has provided India almost US$1 million in emergency supplies and is prepared to send as much as US$5 million worth.
Boy named 'Earthquake'
A boy born in India's western state of Gujarat has been named Earthquake, a local newspaper said.
The Asian Age said Bhukamp -- Hindi for earthquake -- was delivered in darkness after power tripped following Friday's earthquake which has killed at least 20,000 people.
He was born in a private clinic in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's devastated commercial centre.
“When we finally came out (of the operation theatre) we realized what had happened,” the newspaper quoted Rajan Joshi, the doctor who delivered the baby, as saying.
2 babies rescued
The discovery of two living babies on Monday - an eight-month-old boy covered in his dead mother's blood but cradled in her lap and a seven-month-old girl - captured the heartbreak and the singular miracles of India's killer earthquake.
In the boy's case, doctors said the warmth of his mother's body helped him survive three days in the ruins of a collapsed building in Bhuj's Kansara Market.
“We saw the baby in the mother's lap, we saw some movement from the baby,” said R K Thakur, a Border Security Forces assistant commandant. “I took the baby in my hand and I found it was alive.”
The boy, Murtza Ali, was rushed to a medical centre. Surviving relatives were found and the child was later conscious and smiling, Thakur said, adding: “It was miraculous.”
The girl, Sweta Kumar, was rescued from the rubble of her home in a town east of Bhuj. Hours later, her joyous mother and other relatives took turns holding her close.
There are few even partly happy endings in western India these days.
Survivors complained Monday that confusion and a lack of equipment was hampering rescue efforts. Rescuers lacked cranes and bulldozers, and many units did not even have generators, making night work impossible without lights. Soldiers hunting for survivors began work at first light and stopped when the sun went down.
Another day Of searching
Mild tremors shook parts of western India on Monday evening, fueling the fear factor keeping many survivors out in the open.
As day broke yesterday in Bhuj, the ancient town near the epicenter of the quake that measured 7.9 on the Richter scale, people wrapped in blankets lay in a park and on street corners.
Power had been restored in some parts of town, and rescue teams began another day of searching the rubble.
“At some places we hope there might still be some life,” said one army officer who did not want to be named.
Families burned their dead on makeshift funeral pyres along the roadsides on Monday. Eight crematoriums in Bhuj operated non-stop. “We're working flat out to burn the bodies,” crematorium worker Jagdish Bhatt said.
Some 20,000 soldiers have joined local and foreign volunteers in the rescue effort but help was slow getting through in places.
“Relief work needs to be speeded up,” Vajpayee told reporters in a whirlwind tour of the devastated Kutch region.
One woman, Kokila Bhavsar, told Reuters her 76-year-old father was alive for seven hours after the quake but died two hours before his body was taken out.
“He was fine,” she said, standing dazed in front of the building which had become a family tomb in which she had lost her father, mother, sister, brother, sister-in-law and niece.
The cost of rebuilding in Gujarat, a state of 41 million people, will be huge.
The World Bank said it would release US$300 million immediately after India asked it for US$1 billion in reconstruction aid. (SD-Agencies)
The Richter scale
MOST people have heard of the Richter scale -- the measure of the strength of an earthquake -- but what does it really measure and what does it mean?
``The Richter scale is a logarithmic scale,'' said seismic analyst Bill Smith at the Survey's National Earthquake Information Centre in Colorado.
``So each (whole) unit on the scale represents 10 times the ground shaking of the next lower (whole) number.
``A 3/10s difference on the scale represents a factor of about two in the amplitude, or shaking motion, which is how far the ground actually moves.''
As the strength of an earthquake rises by each whole number up the Richter scale, the quake releases 31 times more energy.
Introduced in 1935, the scale is named for American physicist Charles F Richter of the California Institute of Technology, who evolved it from patterns discovered by studying more than 200 earthquakes a year.
The Richter scale is a more objective, quantitative basis of measuring earthquakes than the other widely-used standard, the 12-point Mercalli scale, the US Geological Survey says.
The Richter scale does not measure an earthquake's effects, but gives its strength in terms of the energy released, as measured by seismographs.
The scale starts at one and has no upper limit; each unit is 10 times greater than the one before. Mathematicians call this method of arranging numbers on a scale logarithmic.
For instance, the Survey says, a magnitude of 5.3 might be calculated for a moderate earthquake, and a strong earthquake might be classed as magnitude 6.3. Last week's earthquake in India it has classed as major.
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