Roadside Becomes Clinic for India Quake Victims

By PAUL WATSON

Jan. 29, 2001 12 AM PT

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

BHACHAU, India — Kneeling in the dirt by a busy roadside, in a cloud of dust and oily diesel exhaust, Dr. Rakesh Shah was long past worrying about hygiene as he treated a woman whose pelvis was crushed in India’s devastating earthquake.

He was just trying to see straight enough in the dark to insert a catheter in the right place. Three men held flashlights over his shoulder, but the beams were so dim that he did better waiting for the headlights of another truck in the traffic passing just a few yards away.

His patient, a floor sweeper named Triwani Thakkar, 45, suffered a double fracture to her pelvic bone when Shree Wagad Welfare Hospital here collapsed in Friday morning’s massive quake. Her brother, Ishwar Lal, 35, died.

Shah, a village doctor used to doing a lot with a little, said he had never worked in conditions as terrible as Bhachau’s roadside casualty ward, the only place where Thakkar could get treatment.

“We don’t have any other facility to move her to from here,” the doctor said. “The government can do it, but the government has not come out to move anything here.”

Three days after Friday’s 7.9 quake, India is still struggling to cope with the aftermath of a disaster that may have killed more than 16,000 people and injured at least 15,380 more.

The nation’s defense minister, George Fernandes, told reporters Sunday, “I think we are looking at not less than 20,000” fatalities.

Bhachau is about 45 miles east of Bhuj, near the quake’s epicenter, and the two-lane road leading west from the industrial center of Ahmadabad was crowded all day Sunday with trucks moving past carrying relief aid, cranes and earthmoving equipment.

But an estimated 1,500 bodies are still trapped in the ruins of homes and buildings in Bhachau alone, and survivors here complain that many lives were lost because help came too late.

“The government started by stressing Ahmadabad only, as it is the biggest [city],” said volunteer relief worker Pravin Gala, 36. “When they came to know the situation in Bhuj, the whole focus shifted to there. Everyplace else was left out. A lot of people might be alive now.”

Bhachau’s two-story hospital, once the area’s busiest with 150 doctors, is now a heap of rubble, like almost every other building in this town of about 50,000 people 10 miles south of the Tropic of Cancer.

Two cranes arrived Sunday and lifted off some of the chunks of concrete entombing bodies in the destroyed hospital, but the cranes moved on after about two hours, town residents said.

Gala’s Bombay-based charity flew in 23 doctors by helicopter Saturday morning in a mission paid for with private donations, he said. India’s federal government sent 90 more doctors to Bhuj the same day.

Relief workers laid Thakkar on a thin pad of dirty blankets by the roadside Sunday morning, and she was still there late Sunday night, wincing in pain as Shah inserted a hypodermic needle into her abdomen to drain her bladder.

She was one of eight patients lying under a chilly, starlit sky, amid a cacophony of blaring truck horns, waiting for proper medical care. Most had head injuries and multiple leg fractures, which were set without X-rays because the equipment was destroyed.

They received only basic first aid because doctors didn’t have equipment or drugs to do more than stitch up wounds, and no foreign agencies had come to their aid. On Sunday afternoon, the Indian army began treating quake survivors in a medical tent about 500 yards up the road.

Friday’s quake was so powerful that it rolled the ground like a wave, said Shanti Lal Chandulal, 45. His wife, Vaisant Bhin, 34, died when their house collapsed on her, said Chandulal, who sat in the glow of a small fire.

Of 34 people pulled from the hospital ruins since Friday, 12 were dead. Rescue workers found a man in his mid-40s alive in the rubble Sunday, but he was in very bad shape, said Gala, who is normally a chartered accountant in Bombay, India’s financial and entertainment capital.

“Both of his legs were like an elephant’s, they were so swollen,” he added. “But somehow, we managed to carry him out, and he blessed us like anything.”

Vansi Bhai lost his wife, father-in-law and four other members of his family when the hospital’s walls came crashing down, but rescuers managed to save his son, about 3 years old, in the early hours after the quake.

Bhai’s wife and father-in-law were patients in the hospital when the quake struck, and they died along with four relatives who had come to visit them.

An additional 50 people are still buried in the destroyed hospital and feared dead, including several patients, five staff members and a doctor’s wife, Gala said.

Local police said there were so many dead in Bhachau that survivors ignored Hindu death rites, which require that funeral pyres be made of wood, and began cremating bodies Friday night with anything that would burn.

With all of the houses in Bhachau, Bhuj and dozens of surrounding villages either destroyed or badly damaged, thousands of survivors continued to flee this area Sunday in taxis, in flatbed trucks and in wooden carts hitched to camels.

After watching search crews dig day and night in Bhuj, and seeing one corpse after another carried off for cremation at the local Jubilee Ground, Bhaskar Leuva, 43, gave up Sunday and joined the exodus.

“In our minds, we still feel the earthquake happening,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How to Help

These agencies are among the many accepting contributions for assistance to victims of the earthquake in South Asia.

Catholic Relief Services

P.O. Box 17090

Baltimore, MD 21203-7090

(800) 736-3467

https://www.catholicrelief.org

Direct Relief International

27 S. La Patera Lane

Santa Barbara, CA 93117