India steps up relief ops in Nepal |
India has scaled up relief and rescue efforts in quake-hit Nepal under `Operation Maitri`. India on April 26 deployed two dozen military aircraft and choppers and was also undertaking a big evacuation through the road route The situation in the Himalayan nation is termed “very, very serious”, as nearly1,000 trained personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) were ordered on duty. Meanwhile, the earthquake is said to have been caused as the earth beneath Kathmandu shifted by up 3 meters south, but the height of Mount Everest likely stayed the same. The massive 7.8-magnitude quake on April 25 was the Himalayan nation`s deadliest disaster in more than 80 years. It is likely that the earthquake occurred on the Himalayan Thrust fault, a plate boundary that separates the northern moving Indian sub-continent from Eurasia. The fault dips about 10 degrees to the north-northeast. The relative movement across the fault zone was on the order of three metres at its greatest, just north of Kathmandu. It is not unclear if the shifts may necessitate adjustments to high-precision world maps. Also, an earthquake with its epicenter 5km southwest of Mirik in Darjeeling district rattled West Bengal at 6.05pm on April 27, triggering panic in the hills and plains of North Bengal where terrified people saw it as a sign that the Nepal tragedy was getting closer home.
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