Charity reveals Brighton and Hove residents among the most generous with their donations for victims of Nepal earthquake

City residents have so far donated almost half a million pounds to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) fund.

It comes as Sussex firefighters returned from helping the rescue effort.

DEC chief executive Saleh Saeed said: “The people of Brighton have been incredibly generous and I want to thank each and every person who has donated for their kind support.

“Thanks to the substantial contributions from cities such as Brighton, our teams have been able to reach a large number of people in just a few days, but there is still so much more to do.

“Nearly two weeks on and the response by the UK public continues to amaze me. This money will help us to scale up efforts to reach more of the estimated eight million people affected by the devastating earthquake.”

Sussex’s firefighters who have returned home from the country told The Argus that they had to travel along the “world’s most dangerous roads” on traumatic “body recovery missions.”

But the brave team from West Sussex Fire and Rescue said they “just dealt with what you see”

Firefighter Neil Graham, from Shoreham, said. “It’s when you get home that you start reflecting on the suffering.”

Oxfam worker Lisa Rutherford, 43 , of Patcham, Brighton, is still in Nepal.

She said: “We saw house after house reduced to rubble, with people sitting under flimsy plastic sheets for shelter. Everyone I have met has been so gentle and so welcoming, it has been really hard to see the impact the earthquake has had on their lives.

"I have seen the immediate positive impact that money donated to the DEC has, so would encourage everyone to donate if they can.

“It is so good to hear how generous people have been. Hundreds of thousands of people, many in remote villages, have had their homes damaged or destroyed and are in urgent need of food, water, shelter and medical care.

“Most are sleeping in the open or in make shift camps, with rain and limited accessibility of many locations making aid deliveries challenging.

“Despite immense challenges, aid is getting through to more and more people who desperately need it- and the funds raised by people in Brighton are vital to make this happen”.

UK team first to help unaided villages

SOME of the devastated villages in Nepal were so cut off that our brave firefighters were forced to search for them by helicopter.

Six members of the technical rescue unit, based in Horley, flew to the capital city of Kathmandu on April 27 as part of an international aid effort.

Matt Simmons, Owen Marfany, Antony Walker, Neil Graham and Joe Sacco returned on Wednesday, while Adrian Kirkpatrick remained in the country, where more than 7,500 people have died.

Mr Graham, from Shoreham, said: “We worked in Kathmandu, and some members of the team went out by helicopter to more rural areas.

“Some of the villages we looked at experienced 100% devastation, with all the buildings down.”

The UK team was the first to make contact with several villages, which had received no aid since the quake.

He said: “Road conditions were bad, and for many of these villages there are no real lines of communication anyway, so we would have rescue teams fly up the valleys to spot where villages were.

“Some of the roads my colleagues had to travel on looked like something out of World’s Most Dangerous Roads, falling apart with incredibly steep drops to the side.”

After several days assessing the infrastructure and searching for missing people in central Nepal, the team was asked to turn their efforts to body recovery.

Mr Graham said: “We’re a heavy duty rescue team, so we have rescue dogs, incredibly sensitive listening equipment and cameras to find people under the rubble.”

Despite the traumatic scenes in Nepal and the emotional nature of their work, he said the team would push through and keep working.

“At the time, you just deal with what you see. It’s when you get home that you start reflecting on the suffering out there, although we do have a good support service.”

The team worked to remove concrete from a hospital where a tower on top had collapsed, endangering patients and shutting large parts of the vital centre.

Mr Graham added: “People were frightened to go in, as they could see the fallen parts, and parts of it were not safe at all.

"There were 270 operations which couldn’t go ahead and people would have died if they had to wait for too long, but they were able to open the operating theatre up after our work.

"It was immensely satisfying to know that we had helped those people.”

He said they had to be creative in their approach, adding: “We had to work with what was out there. At one point we were using the British ambassador’s daughter’s hula hoop and strong netting, and we had to fix our metal saw to a bamboo pole to remove masonry.”

The technical rescue team had previously been deployed to earthquakes in Haiti, Indonesia, Japan and New Zealand.

Mr Graham said: “I’ve been in Indonesia in the past, and New Zealand after the earthquake there and it’s very difficult to give comparisons from one rescue operation to another.

"But one thing I would say is that the Nepalese have been incredibly resilient. Even after four or five days without food or drink, you wouldn’t get groups of people rushing at foreign aid workers. They are calm, welcoming and smiley, and are good at helping themselves.”

£33m raised by UK

GENEROUS Britons have given more than £33million in aid for Nepal – and fundraising events are still taking place across Sussex.

Brighton-based comedy fundraiser Charity Chuckle has dedicated their May show to the charity Our Sansar, which works with impoverished children in Nepal.

Our Sansar’s emergency earthquake appeal is targeted at rural areas in the south of the country, which are outside the reach of the central aid efforts.

Charity Chuckle at Komedia, Brighton, on May 12 is headlined by American comedian Al Lubel, with support from Mark Simmons, Sam Savage and Juliet Myers.

Tickets cost £10 and are available from charitychuckle.co.uk

The University of Brighton has launched an urgent appeal for funds to rebuild a school it funded in Nepal.

The school, in the remote hamlet of Malagiri, has 60 pupils, but was severely damaged in the earthquake. To dontate visit justgiving.com/School-for-Malagiri.

Staff at Higgins and Co Tattoos, of Terminus Road, Eastbourne, have also been fundraising and will hold a drop-in tattooing day in aid of the relief effort.

Their instagram account @nepalfundraiserauction is auctioning more than 100 items, and their five resident tattoo artists will be joined by four guests for the tattoo event next Monday.

At Brighton College, pupils will attempt to collectively bounce the height of Mount Everest on a bouncy castle, in aid of a remote Nepalese hospital.

And Brighton artist Stuart Smith will be selling prints and paintings of Nepal inspired by his trip to the country last year, at his Open House Festival event at 14 St Heliers Avenue, Hove.

For more details visit aoh.org.uk.