Soldiers, rescue teams and medical personnel raced to a corner of the eastern Himalayas on Monday after a major earthquake collapsed buildings and caused landslides that buried roads, killing at least 55 people in northeastern India, Nepal and Tibet and damaging more than 100,000 homes. The quake, which struck Sunday night in the mountainous region near the town of Mangan in India's Sikkim state, registered 6.9 on the Richter scale and sent tremors as far away as Bangladesh and the Indian cities of Kolkata and New Delhi. Several aftershocks followed, further rattling residents. Because of the remoteness of the region and the disruption of phone service, news about the damage and casualties was slow to filter in. On Monday, police said that at least 25 people had been killed in Sikkim capital of Gangtok, as well as at least 11 in the states of West Bengal and Bihar. In neighboring Nepal, at least seven people were killed, including two men and a child who died when a wall outside the British embassy in Kathmandu collapsed. Members of Nepal's parliament also reportedly ran out of the assembly building in the capital during a debate on the national budget. And in China, the official Xinhua news agency confirmed that seven people had died in southern Tibet, where several homes collapsed. (See photos from the 6.9 earthquake in India and Nepal.) According to CNN-IBN, the Indian air force has dispatched two of its new C-130J Super Hercules aircraft to the region to assist in the rescue operation. It's the first time the air force has deployed the planes, which were purchased from the U.S. in 2008 for $1 billion and can conduct low-level airdrops and land in blackout conditions. Around 400 rescue specialists and medical personnel from the National Disaster Response Force were also sent to the area, but they were stuck in West Bengal state Monday because of a massive landslide that had blocked the road. According to media reports, the highway was blocked in some 25 places and engineers were rushing to clear the debris as quickly as possible. Officials say the extent of the damage will only be known after rescue teams can reach the area. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called an emergency meeting of the National Disaster Management Authority, and Sonia Gandhi, president of India's Congress Party, expressed her "deep concern and anxiety" over the quake and urged authorities to quickly extend help to the affected areas. Singh also announced compensation of $4,000 for the families of those killed and $2,000 for those seriously wounded. Local officials said they, too, were mobilizing rescue teams as rapidly as they could. "When the earthquake happened, I, too, felt the tremor. Our departments are on the job, we are gathering information," Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar state, told reporters. Prem Das, a member of Parliament from the state, told the Indian television channel CNN-IBN that the biggest worry was reaching small villages on mountaintops that were completely cut off by the quake. Heavy rains were slowing rescuers too. Television images showed army trucks stopped by downpours in West Bengal, and men, women and children huddled under umbrellas at a makeshift camp in Pegong, north Sikkim. (See the successes and challenges of India's 60 years of independence.) Though the rugged area is thinly populated, it is popular with tourists. The Press Trust of India news agency reported that police had rescued 15 foreign tourists in northern Sikkim, but it did not give their nationalities. Complicating matters is the fact that power outages were widespread across Sikkim, Bihar and West Bengal states. The cities of Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal were "in total darkness," the state's chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, told the Press Trust of India on Sunday. Sunday's quake was the biggest in the Himalayan region in 20 years. The deadliest tremors to have struck northeastern India occurred in 1950 and 1897. Each killed more than 1,500 people.
