Ottawa Filmmaker Documents Nepal Earthquake from Everest
Elia Saikaly, a climber and filmmaker from Ottawa, who was near the Mount Everest base camp when a deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck, caught footage of the horrific 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook Nepal on Saturday.
According to CBC news, Saikaly and his team were stationed at a camp not far from the main base camp when the earthquake hit.
“We ran outside and it felt as though we were surfing on the extremely hard glacier ice that we were standing on,” Saikaly told Ottawa Morning host Robyn Bresnahan on Monday. “Before we knew it, there was this 200 to 300-foot tidal wave of snow heading directly towards us, so we dove into the mess tent, zipped it down and just dove onto the ground and started to pray.”
“It [sounded] like thunderous rock fall combined with what must have been 100 or 200-mile-an-hour winds, obviously from the snow coming directly towards us. It was terrible.”
The death toll, according to CBC news now stands at over 4,000. There are reports of shortages of critical supplies shush as food, water, shelter, medicine and aid workers. There are reports of villages where as much as 70% of moves being destroyed.
Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake spread from Kathmandu to small villages and to the slopes of Mount Everest, triggering an avalanche that buried parts of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts.
All mountaineering on the Chinese side of Everest has now been cancelled in the wake of the quake. China’s official Xinhua News Agency quoted an official with the Tibetan bureau of sports as saying that an avalanche at 7,000 metres and the possibility of further aftershocks was considered to have made climbing too dangerous. There was no word on when the ban would be lifted.
For more information visit CBC News.