Pakistan Earthquake 2005

Covering the earthquake, the damage and the relief work in Pakistan.

Archive for December, 2005

Thousands still without basic shelter two months after quake

Thousands of earthquake survivors are still without shelter more than two months on. The earthquake, which killed over 80,000 people, left an estimated 3.5 million survivors homeless. The exact figure of homeless survivors is not known, said Darren Boisvert, media and public information officer for the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“The problem is that we’re still finding people who don’t have sufficient shelter so we can’t accurately estimate how many people there are left,” Boisvert said. The Pakistani government estimates that 480,000 houses need to be rebuilt in Pakistani-administered Kashmir alone.

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MSF Choppers Available for NGOs!

MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) Holland has offered the humanitarian community access to its two Muzaffarabad based A350 ‘Squirrel’ helicopters. Requests can be made by NGOs, to conduct assessment flights in the affected area and for transport of personnel. However, agencies should note that the ‘Squirrels’ have a limited cargo capacity of approximately 350kg.

Any NGO or aid agency wishing to avail themselves of this offer may contact the MSF Holland logistics team on 0300 852 6616 or via e-mail: msfh-abbottabad at field.amsterdam.msf.org, to obtain further details.

Source: South Asia Quake Help via UNJLC Team (Pakistan)

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Rehabilitation of At Least One Affected Family

Project PEACE Welfare Society is pleased to submit this request for your review.

We look forward to your partnership in our cooperative efforts to provide rehabilitation to at least one Earthquake affected family of 5 members. You can save 5 lives by just spending $2100 or as much as you can or anything else.

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The End of the World, Part III

High above the valley city of Muzaffarabad, the view is at once terrible and awesome. Stretching for miles along both sides of the turbid Jhelum River is what’s left of a major city — in every direction piles of rubble and dust and glass, still hiding thousands of corpses, with all the standing structures giant deathtraps mined with fatal cracks. Above all that, on a piece of exposed earth on a mountain plateau now home to a sprawling tent city of displaced persons called Tariqabad, a young man shows me his new home. His eight-member family’s tent is on the edge of a dirt slope. There is no plastic sheet on the ground, no blankets, nothing. The family simply sleeps on top of one another in their clothes, their only possessions. At the first rainfall, I’m guessing, their floor will turn to mud and they will all slide some 1,500 feet down the cliff in the middle of the night. I ask about that.

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UNICEF fears increased child labour

The UN children’s agency is worried child survivors of earthquake are having to look for work to support their families.

Most schools in the region were destroyed in the quake. Some schools have reopened but most children still have no classes to go to. Some, like 14-year-old Mohammad Irfan, are starting work instead. “I have to help my family because we have big problems. We lost everything we had,” Irfan said in the small town of Pattika, where on Monday he got a job as a shop delivery boy.

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Igloos can save lives

140,000 people are stranded above the snowline in the Pakistani Himalayan Mountains without access to shelter and 2.7 million are without shelter. Snow may fall anytime and trap hundreds of thousands who will freeze to death.

Aid workers say that the first significant snow of the winter is [will expose] millions of homeless people to the threat of hunger and hypothermia.

Here is a true Innovative Emergency Shelter for Quake Survivors. It has been time-tested in frigid winters, costs nothing to build, and the recipe can be quickly given to a million or more people at a time.

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Las Cruces workers aid in Pakistan relief efforts

New Mexico employees of a Seattle firm were among a team of 30 Americans who spent Thanksgiving week in northern Pakistan building shelters to house more than 1,000 homeless earthquake victims. They also helped build hospitals and schools in the area.

The crew came from Alaska Structures, which has designed and produced rugged, portable fabric structures for 25 years for use by disaster relief groups, military units, medical facilities and others. It brought with it $2 million worth of shelters and donated 142 insulated fabric structures that included two schools, two hospitals and more than 100 family living units.

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Hundreds of Pneumonia cases reported in quake hit areas

Health officials in Pakistan have said that hundreds of people, most of them children, had contracted pneumonia in the earthquake-stricken areas of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. “Yes, we are receiving pneumonia cases running into hundreds from different areas. Most of the victims are children,” the district health officer in Muzaffarabad, Sardar Mahmood Ahmed Khan, told the Pakistani daily Dawn.

A three-member health team has been sent to Darbang and Nariola villages to evaluate the situation and more teams were expected to arrive from Islamabad in a day or two.

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