GROUP OF WEXFORD CLIMBERS IN NEPAL ‘LUCKY TO BE ALIVE’
A Wexford man has told how his mother narrowly escaped when a temple collapsed in an aftershock in Nepal at the weekend.
Keith Jordan from Westgate Design said his mother Catherine is among a group of eight Wexford climbers who arrived shortly before Saturday’s initial 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
The group also included other well known business and professional people from the county, including Father Tom Dalton, the parish priest in Riverchapel.
Keith Jordan says the group are lucky to be alive and are now focused on catching their flights home on Wednesday.
“They left the temple, all eight of them, and 10 minutes later there was an aftershock and that temple collapsed killing lots of people” he said.
“I think the whole experience has been very traumatic for them…I was speaking to my mother this morning and I just said ‘how do you feel’, and she said she just can’t explain it, she’s in shock”.
“I think it’s going to be very traumatic for them to be still in the middle of it” he added.
Meanwhile the scale of the magnitude of Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal was so great that it registered in County Wexford.
It was picked up at the seisimic station situated on Carrigbyrne Hill in the centre of the county.
The station is operated by the Irish National Seismic Network and the 7.9 magnitude eathquake was recorded on a graph their as the tremor struck some 7,500 kilometres away.
