Saturday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Nepal spread horror from Kathmandu to small villages and to the slopes of Mount Everest, triggering an avalanche that buried part of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts.
Michael Churton, a documentary film maker from New York, considers himself lucky that he managed to survive the massive earthquake and avalanche at Mount Everest base camp where he was filming a documentary on the Everest ascent.
Churton, 38, was with four other colleagues at the base camp at 17,500 feet ascent when the earthquake struck, sending tons of ice and snow down the mountain.
“It's a big ice shelf and it must have just released. We saw it hit, it kind of hits one level and then it just shot right back up. And then I saw -- so I told the group to get down. It was like 4,000 feet of snow just kind of coming and there's nowhere to run. So I told everybody to get down and then, put my hands over my head and like just buried myself as much as I could. And basically snow hit, it's about 45 seconds or a minute for it to go by,” he said.
Churton says the camp, which is about one square kilometer, was devastated and they still do not know the fate of one of their colleagues.
At least 17 people were killed on Mount Everest in the earthquake-triggered avalanche. More than 60 people were injured.
Mountain rescue teams, helped by clear weather, used helicopters on Monday to airlift climbers still stranded.
REUTERS
For more details, watch Rita Khoury’s full report in the video above