KATMANDU, Nepal -- Dozens of aftershocks in Nepal on Sunday hampered efforts to find survivors of a more powerful earthquake the day before that killed more than 2,500 people and injured as many as 5,900, with the toll still mounting.
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A magnitude-6.7 aftershock was followed by one of 5.3 magnitude after nightfall. Close to 50 aftershocks have been logged since Saturday's magnitude-7.8 earthquake, adding to the chaos as panicked residents avoid returning to damaged homes.
Rain has slowed power restoration and other relief efforts, including the clearing away of corpses, raising concern about the potential for disease outbreaks.
The new tremors prompted authorities to temporarily halt flights into Katmandu, the capital.
The main earthquake that struck shortly before noon Saturday triggered avalanches on Mount Everest, killing at least 18, including a Google product manager, and injuring 61.
"Rescue teams are looking for those buried -- the priority is looking for survivors," Tirtha Raj Wagle, an official at the Nepalese Embassy in New Delhi, said Sunday.
Acrid, white smoke rose above the nation's most revered Hindu temple, where dozens of bodies were being cremated at any given time.
Aid groups received the first word from remote mountain villages -- reports that suggested many communities perched on mountainsides were devastated or struggling to cope.
Landslides hindered rescue teams that tried to use mountain trails to reach those in need, said Prakash Subedi, chief district official in the Gorkha region, where the quake was centered.
Nepal authorities said Sunday that at least 2,430 people died in that country alone, not including the 18 dead in the avalanche. Another 61 people died from the quake in India and a few died in other neighboring countries.
At least 1,152 people died in Katmandu, and the number of injured nationwide was about 5,900. With search-and-rescue efforts far from over, it was unclear how much the death toll would rise. Three policemen died during a rescue effort in Katmandu, police spokesman Komal Singh Bam said.
Prime Minister Sushil Koirala, who was attending a conference in Indonesia when the quake struck, had rushed back to Katmandu and was to speak in a televised address Sunday. But the speech was delayed by the strong tremors that continue to rock the country.
The International Monetary Fund, humanitarian groups and governments from China to India to Israel rushed to provide assistance to Nepal, one of Asia's poorest countries.
"We need the ability to bring clean water to the people that need it most, in a place where cholera is endemic," Chris Skopec, a senior director of emergency preparedness at the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit relief agency, said on CBS' Face the Nation program Sunday.
Rain hampers efforts
Streets in parts of Katmandu, a city of about 1.2 million, were impassable not so much from quake damage but because tens of thousands of people took up residence there. It was a strategy endorsed by the government
The already difficult situation in much of the capital, where safe shelters are scarce, was made worse Sunday when rain began to pour down on huddled masses.
Widespread rains are forecast to hit Nepal over the next 24 hours, threatening to further hinder relief efforts, the India Meteorological Department said Sunday. It warned citizens to beware of possible landslides.
"People will be terrified to be indoors. It means then that people will be exposed the the elements," Orla Fagan of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Face the Nation from Bangkok.
Damage to Nepal's water and sewage systems raises the possibility of water-borne diseases, Fagan said. "At this stage, we're talking about really life-saving response."
Separately, the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, estimated that about 1 million children in the quake area need help.
On Sunday, the government began setting up 16 relief stations across Katmandu and the rest of the country while rescue operations continued.
The government announced that schools would remain closed for at least five days, and it asked government workers to help in local rescue efforts in place of their usual jobs.
Stephen Groves, who lives in Katmandu, said he was inspecting a building for cracks shortly after noon Sunday when the biggest of many aftershocks hit.
"The whole time I was thinking if the building next to me was going to come down on top of me," Groves said in an email. "People here are in a panic, and every aftershock contributes to that. They are not going indoors, they are staying in the roads and in open areas. Many are searching for family members."
Neighboring India will rush more relief and rescue personnel to Nepal and increase supplies of medicine and food for the quake affected, Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar said in New Delhi on Sunday. The country will also set up medical camps along its border with Nepal, he said.
India suffered its own losses from the quake, with at least 61 people killed there and dozens injured. Sunday's aftershock was also widely felt in the country, and local news reports said metro trains in New Delhi and Kolkata were briefly shut down when the shaking started.
A website backed by the International Committee of the Red Cross listed hundreds of foreign tourists in Nepal who remained missing. Google said it had started a "person finder" tool to help track people missing in the earthquake, and would commit $1 million to its response.
The quake will likely put a big strain on the resources of the impoverished country best known for Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The economy of Nepal, a nation of 27.8 million people, relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.
Many Nepalese reside in unreinforced brick masonry structures. The country's shoddy building standards and lack of preparedness for a major earthquake were the subjects of an international conference in Katmandu earlier this month.
Television images showed rescuers pulling out people who were trapped under the 19th-century Dharahara Tower, a nine-story structure in Katmandu that collapsed.
"It was so powerful and the entire house was shaking, so we got out," said Sila Gurung, 28, who lives in a three-story home with her mother in Katmandu's Nakhipot district, close to the popular tourist site Patan Durbar Square. "Everyone is very scared, and no one knows when it will be safe to go back home."
18 dead on Everest
On Mount Everest, helicopter rescue operations began Sunday morning to get wounded climbers down off the mountain, where at least 18 climbers were killed and dozens more injured, making the earthquake the deadliest event in the mountain's history.
Three Americans were among those killed, according to the U.S. State Department.
Daniel Fredinburg, an executive with Google's privacy team and self-described "adventurer/engineer," died of a head injury on Mount Everest, his sister wrote on the social media site Instagram.
Three other company employees in the same group are safe, Lawrence You, Google's director of privacy, said on Google Plus.
Aftershocks and small avalanches throughout the day Sunday continued to plague the nearly 800 people staying at the mountain base camp and at higher elevation camps.
Many climbers remain stranded in two camps above the base camp, said Zimba Zangbu, a former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association. The injured and survivors are being airlifted from the base camp to Katmandu, according to Ang Tshering, the association's current president.
As the first stunned survivors of the avalanche reached Katmandu, they said that dozens of people may still be missing and were almost certainly dead.
"The snow swept away many tents and people," said Gyelu Sherpa, a guide among the first group of 15 injured survivors to reach the city.
Tulasi Prasad Gautam, director general of Nepal's Tourism Department, said he feared that continued aftershocks had trapped more climbers.
Witnesses said the avalanche began on Mount Pumori, a 22,966-foot-high mountain just a few miles from Everest, gathering strength as it headed toward base camp and the lower reaches of Everest's climbing routes. Numerous climbers remained stranded Sunday on routes above base camp, but teams in contact by satellite telephones said no one was believed to be in danger or running short of supplies.
Azim Afif, the 27-year-old leader of a climbing team from University of Technology Malaysia, estimated that about 80 percent of the people at base camp had left by midafternoon Sunday.
About 30 mountaineers from the Indian army had been scaling the mountain when the quake struck. The men are safe and are participating in the rescue operations, said the Defense Ministry.
The Himalayan region is one of the world's most active seismic zones as the Indian subcontinent pushes north into the central Asia tectonic plate. The 1934 earthquake in Nepal, just west of Sikkim, killed more than 16,000 people. A 2005 quake in Kashmir killed more than 70,000 in Pakistan.
Information for this article was contributed by Unni Krishnan, Anto Antony, Tony Jordan, Debjit Chakraborty, Jeanette Rodrigues, Kartikay Mehrotra, Bibhudatta Pradhan, Adi Narayan, Bhuma Shrivastava, Abhishek Shanker, Gwen Ackerman and Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg News; by Thomas Fuller, Gardiner Harris, Bhadra Sharma, Nida Najar, Hari Kumar and Suhasini Raj of The New York Times; and by Binaj Gurubacharya, Katy Daigle, Muneeza Naqvi, Tim Sullivan, Karly Domb Sadof of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/27/2015