Pakistan Earthquake 2005

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

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Quake relief gears up but problems remain

Streams of people clambered into the hills of northern Pakistan carrying aid back to quake-shattered villages on Tuesday as clear weather helped a huge relief operation accelerate.

Some villagers had trekked as much as 35 km to the wrecked town of Muzaffarabad to pick up food and blankets as the harsh winter approaches. “We are desperate,” said Muhammad Naeem after walking seven hours with dozens of men, women and teenaged boys from his village in the Neelum valley, a region cut off by landslides and which he said had received only a few air drops.

“We can take only a very small quantity of goods on foot as it is a very difficult and long walk to our village up in the hills.” The emphasis now is relief, not rescue. Helicopters, back in the air after weekend rains grounded the only means of getting aid deep into the mountains quickly, delivered supplies and brought back people who had lain injured since their world, high in the hills, was shattered 10 days ago.

However, helicopters have not been able to reach some mountainside communities—forcing many desperate villagers to trek for hours, even days, in search of help—and nor have they been able to deliver enough to those within reach.

“Fifty per cent of Neelum Valley has still not been reached by helicopter or ground troops. It will take another week to 10 days,” said Major-General Jawed Aslam Tahir, who is running the air relief operations.

“Given the numbers we’re trying to reach and the scale of the commodities we are trying to move, we need a functioning road network and trucks on the road 24 hours a day,” said Robert Holden, head of the UN relief operation in Muzaffarabad. That is not going to happen soon.

Rebuilding roads buckled or swept away by landslides will take weeks and much of the relief pouring into the region is heading up into the rugged mountains on two feet or four. Troops were cutting tracks across landslides so heavily laden mules, which can carry far more than a human, could cross them.

“Pushing out from here is going to prove problematic for some time,” Holden said in Muzaffarabad. It will remain like that for quite a while. By nightfall on Tuesday, Army engineers should have cleared just 4 km of the valley’s 160-km road, a senior officer said. He estimated 10 km of the road was totally blocked and at least half of the rest partially blocked.

The deputy head of Muzaffarabad’s civil administration, Liaquat Hussain, said there were plans for tent cities to house 20,000 people in and around the town. More than 100,000 tents and 700,000-800,000 blankets would be needed and building the camps—where people could be supplied with food, healthcare, schools and other services—would depend on when the tents arrived.

Army engineers tore through landslides on Tuesday to reopen an earthquake-ravaged road, the latest route to be restored to remote villages such as Sanghar near Balakot, cut off from supplies by land for 10 days. Army bulldozers have been trudging meter by meter through the rocks and mud to reach isolated mountain areas which have been at the mercy of helicopter relief since the massive October 8 earthquake.

On Tuesday, the earth-moving crew finally reached Sanghar, a mountain town some six kilometres north of Balakot, the valley town in the NWFP reduced to a sea of tents. But there are more villages badly hit by the quake stretching some 30 kilometres from Balakot into the mountains to the north. The reopening of the road will provide a crucial new conduit of aid into the mountains.

Helicopters were also roaring through the sky at a breakneck pace on Tuesday for the second straight day after a weekend of rain that grounded flights, leaving an untold number of stranded survivors to die.

Separately, the UN World Food Programme on Tuesday warned that half a million earthquake survivors have yet to receive relief supplies. The relief effort is one of the most challenging the world has ever faced, according to James Morris, executive director of the WFP. “The aid agencies have managed to give some help to hundreds of thousands of people, but there are an estimated half a million more people out there in desperate need, who no one has managed to reach,” Morris said in Dubai.

“People don’t just need food — first of all they need shelter, blankets and medical assistance — then food and clean water.” The WFP said hundreds of villages had not yet received help. Keith Ursel, Muzaffarabad operations head for the WFP, said thousands of lives were at stake. “We need 570 tonness of food every day to feed the affected people stranded in these villages,” he said. “It is always a mixture of starvation, wounds or rough weather and fear which lead to massive deaths in such a situation.”

Meanwhile, a senior United Nations official said on Tuesday there were not enough tents in the world to protect refugees from the coming winter after the October 8 earthquake. Tents are a priority item with around four million people made homeless, many of them forced to live in the open in plummeting temperatures in Azad Kashmir and parts of NWFP.

“It is fair to say the indication is that there are not enough tents in the world available to support the requirements,” Andrew MacLeod, chief operations officer in the UN emergency response centre in Islamabad, told AFP.

“If there is another emergency in the next few months (elsewhere in the world) it will be very difficult. So that is a huge issue right now,” UN spokeswoman Amanda Pitt said. Pitt said it was impossible to give a definitive figure on how many tents were needed, but said authorities were working on a homeless figure of between 2.8 and 3.2 million, with an average of five members per family.

Relief agencies were scrambling to find warm tents from wherever they could before snows begin to fall on the devastated mountain villages of Kashmir and northern Pakistan, the spokeswoman said.

“We are trying to get them from everywhere. Neighbouring countries are key … and China, Korea, Singapore, the Middle East, everywhere,” Pitt said. “The whole thing here is a nightmare. I know it sounds dramatic to say this but it really is a case of nature overwhelming man,” Pitt said. “It is just phenomenal, there are whole villages that are not accessible at the best of times. Getting supplies into them is a superhuman effort,” she said.

In Geneva aid agencies sounded the alarm on Tuesday at the slow international response to appeals for money to help victims of the Pakistan earthquake in which the United Nations says more than 32,000 children may have died.

The Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which coordinates UN relief work, said it had received only five per cent of the $272 million for which it appealed last week. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies — the world’s largest disaster relief network — said it had only 25 per cent of the 73 million Swiss francs ($56.72 million) sought.

“We are worried that this trend will not allow us to fully support the Pakistan Red Crescent’s ongoing relief operation to initially assist tens of thousands of families over the next four months,” said Susan Johnson, director of operations at the Geneva-based federation.

The federation usually receives pledges from donors for “more funds more quickly” for disasters of this magnitude, it said in a statement. Besides the $15 million received in cash, OCHA spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs said the UN had some $45 million in pledges. “We need this money as soon as possible in cash,” she said.

The lack of money had not yet hurt the relief effort because international agencies were drawing on reserves to finance their operations, she added. Byrs said the UN appeal was only part of the international response and that some $165 million had been raised elsewhere, including through direct bilateral donations from other states. Aid-in-kind — donations of food, material and medicines — were also not included in the UN figures, she added. She said many needed clean drinking water.

Source: The News

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