KATHMANDU, Nepal — Surrounded by the rubble of a collapsed guest house Thursday morning, a dozen rescue workers crouched outside a small opening between two cement slabs, trying to reach a teenaged boy trapped 10 feet inside.
He had lain there for five days since Saturday’s massive earthquake, unharmed but alone and unable to move, until Nepalese police finally heard his voice calling for help early Thursday.
Atop the pile of cement chunks and tangled cables, Dan Hanfling, a medical team manager from Fairfax County, Virginia, shouted a stream of questions and comments to the men below, which included Nepalese police, Los Angeles County rescue workers and 15 other members of various emergency squads from Fairfax.
“We’ve got the IV set ready right here. What else do you need?” called down Hanfling, one of 130 American rescue workers sent here after the quake as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team. Their priority mission is to help rescue trapped survivors.
“Another car jack,” one of his teammates called back. The jack was passed down to help prop up a tunnel to the youth, then a miner’s lamp and glow sticks, small blades to cut through metal, and finally medicine to counter the “crushing” effect on limbs with no circulation.
“He hasn’t been crushed, but he’s been lying there for five days without moving,” Hanfling explained.
Long minutes passed. Dozens of news photographers, alerted to the mounting drama, tried to crowd near the opening, but scores of Nepalese police pushed them back, and Chris Schaff, a Fairfax fire battalion chief, warned them not to set off a landslide
Suddenly, a local police officer near the opening raised his hand for silence. The chatter in Nepali and English died out and everyone listened intently. “He wants juice,” Hanfling’s teammate called again. The trapped youth was desperately thirsty and asking for something to drink.
Twenty minutes later, there was flurry of activity near the opening and someone gestured for a yellow plastic stretcher to be brought. As camera crews surged forward down the rubble pile, the young man, later identified as Pemba Tamang, was gently drawn from the opening and tied onto the stretcher.
Tamang was wearing a black New York Yankees T-shirt, and weeping in anguish and relief. The stretcher was passed up hand to hand, then carried to the street, where an ambulance was waiting and a huge crowd erupted in cheers — celebrating a welcome bit of good fortune as Nepal digs out from a disaster that has claimed more than 5,500 lives.
Later Thursday, another survivor was pulled from the rubble in Kathmandu, Reuters reported.
A 23-year-old maid, Krishna Devi Khadka, was found lying along with the bodies of three other people, police said.
Tamang’s rescue “really was a miracle,” Schaff said as he watched another colleague, Ron Sanders, urge his sniffer dog to climb in and out of the collapsed guest house, in case someone else was left alive underneath. Above them, cement slabs and a sharp metal roof pointed downward, frozen in vertical fall.
The boy told the Associated Press he was working in the building when it began to cave in during the quake.
“I thought I was about to die,” he said.
All he had to eat while trapped was some ghee, or clarified butter, he said.
It was the Fairfax team’s first live rescue since arriving in the Nepalese capital Monday, after which they spent two days combing damaged urban areas and inspecting high-rise buildings.
The team ran into repeated logistical and communication difficulties in the clogged capital. Traveling in a caravan Wednesday with vehicles full of rescue equipment, they were stopped several times by quake debris blocking the roads and had to turn back. One building manager did not want to allow them on his site; another reported possible a building collapse turned out to be a false alarm.
But on Thursday, the Fairfax visitors were ebullient over Tamang’s rescue, though they played down their role in the rescue and deferred to the Nepalese police.
“It feels great to be able to assist, to come to a strange culture and collaborate,” Schaff said.
Another member of the team, getting ready for their Wednesday mission, joked that he had told his 11-year-old he was going to visit “where the yeti lives,” which amused several of his colleagues.
As the rescue ended, two Nepalese officers had who worked all morning to dig out the young man were lifted up as heroes by the jubilant crowd waiting outside. One of the officers, D.B. Kinwar, grinned happily amid the cheers.
“We kept telling him he would be fine, and we gave him moral support,” Kinwar said. “He is still alive and healthy.”
The young man’s dramatic rescue was one of the few scenes of joyful relief Thursday in the sodden, shocked capital, where people wandered beside the roads like ghosts or sat silently in plastic tents strung up outside their half-ruined houses. Stray dogs covered with mud sniffed half-heartedly at piles of rotting garbage and household debris.
In the Balaju bypass area, a warren of rocky lanes just a mile or two from the rescue site, families camped in tents spoke matter-of-factly about how many people had lived or died in each house. They also recounted far more dire tales from their home villages, saying most of the houses had been destroyed and many people killed.
“I was taking a bath when the earthquake came. I escaped when the second floor became the first floor, but five other people died and did not get out,” 19-year-old college student Santu Tamang said. She said everyone was worried now about the mud and garbage spreading diseases, including swine flu.
In a ruined house with cracked blue walls, an elderly woman wept disconsolately. Nearby Arvina Gureng, 11, said the police and the army had come to search for the living and take away the dead, but that they had been forced to stop because of aftershocks.
“I thought we are all dead, but now I think we are safe,” the little girl said solemnly. Then she blurted out something that still troubled her. “Why do earthquakes come?” she asked. “Can we really be safe from them?”
Washington Post staff writers Daniela Deane in London contributed to this report.