Cold, hungry and helpless: Quake victims wait for aid
Injured and hungry, families huddled under makeshift tents waiting for relief supplies today after Pakistan’s worst earthquake wiped out entire villages, buried roads in rubble and knocked out electricity and water supplies. The death toll ranged from 20,000 and 30,000 and is expected to rise.
The United Nations warned that more than 2.5 million people were in need of shelter after Saturday's 7.6-magnitude quake. With landslides still blocking roads to many of the worst-hit areas, Pakistan’s army was flying food, water and medicines into the disaster zone. The US military planned to send eight helicopters from Afghanistan.
In addition to those killed in Pakistan, mostly in its mountainous north, India reported more than 650 dead, and Afghanistan said four were killed.
In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s portion of divided Kashmir, about 2,000 people huddled around camp fires through the cold night on a soccer field on the university campus, where most buildings had collapsed and hundreds were feared trapped inside. Soldiers with shovels and iron bars were trying to burrow into the concrete to find survivors.
Mohammed Ullah Khan, 50, said he had nothing to eat for three days except a few biscuits handed out by relief workers. His wife, who suffered a fractured leg, was wrapped up in a yellow quilt beside him.
Their three-storey home had collapsed from the quake. His family of 10 people survived because they were on the top floor, which crashed to the ground.
“My children are now on a hillside, under the open sky, with nothing to eat,” he said.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said the earthquake was the country’s worst on record and appealed for urgent help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas.
In response, US president George Bush promised cash and said he had told Musharraf “we want to help in any way we can”.
“Thousands of people have died, thousands are wounded, and the US of America wants to help,” Bush said from the Oval Office.
Rival India also offered assistance.
Pakistani prime minister Shaukat Aziz said his country’s death toll was 19,396 and was expected to rise. The interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said most of the deaths were in Pakistani Kashmir, and that 42,397 were injured. The worst-hit city was Muzaffarabad, where 11,000 died. One official put the Kashmir death toll much higher.
“I have been informed by my department that more than 30,000 people have died in Kashmir,” Tariq Mahmmod, communications minister for the Himalayan region, told The Associated Press.
Troops “have not started relief work in remote villages where people are still buried in the rubble, and in some areas nobody is present to organise funerals for the dead”, he said.
The quake was felt across a wide swathe of south Asia, from central Afghanistan to western Bangladesh. It swayed buildings in the capitals of three nations, with the damage spanning at least 250 miles from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory. In Islamabad, a 10-storey building collapsed.
In Geneva, the United Nations reported that it was urgently appealing for funds from donors, including for at least 200,000 winterised tents.
Nations offering assistance included the US, Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, Japan and Germany.
An eight-member UN team of top disaster co-ordination officials arrived in Islamabad on Sunday to plan the global body’s response.
Residents of Muzaffarabad said they were facing food and petrol shortages. The city of 600,000 had no water or electricity supply, and people collected water from a mountain stream. Most of the shops on the main street and the city’s military hospital had collapsed. Cars were trapped under a landslide near the main bus terminal.
“Eighty per cent of the region is destroyed,” said Ozgur Bozoglu, a member of a Turkish search-and-rescue team, GEA, operating in Muzaffarabad.
“The situation is very bad. Surgeries are being conducted on soccer fields. There are not enough doctors.”
Balakot, in North West Frontier Province about 60 miles north of Islamabad, was also badly hit.
Three schools in the town of about 30,000 had collapsed, and hundreds were believed trapped inside, with little hope of finding survivors.
On the Indian side of the militarised Kashmir border – where at least 650 have died – hundreds rushed out of their homes and spent the frigid night in the open after rumours of another temblor.
Hundreds of mosques announced warnings of a further quake over loudspeakers, but none was reported.
The US Geological Survey said the quake was centred about 60 miles north east of Islamabad, six miles below the forested mountains of Pakistani Kashmir. That was followed by at least 22 aftershocks within 24 hours, including a 6.2-magnitude temblor.
