PAKISTAN - AFGHANISTAN - INDIA HORROR

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Pakistan Appeals for Help as Rescuers Dig by Hand

         
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: October 10, 2005
GARHI HABIBULLAH, Pakistan, Oct. 9 

Twenty-four hours after the most powerful earthquake in the history of independent Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf made an urgent televised appeal on Sunday for international aid, at least 140 aftershocks rattled survivors, and rescue crews dug, often with their bare hands, for signs of the living and the dead in the rain-soaked rubble of obliterated villages.

B. K. Bangash/Associated Press
Villagers in Balakot, Pakistan, about 60 miles north of Islamabad, carried an injured survivor Sunday from the rubble of a commercial college.

Farooq Naeem/Agence France-Press — Getty Images
The earthquake caused a bridge to collapse in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.
From throughout Pakistan, a variety of estimates on the death toll poured in. By evening, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said 19,369 people had died and at least 43,000 had been injured, based on estimates from local officials. But with much of the country still unseen by the authorities, it was impossible to settle on a definitive figure. "There are clearly several areas which are inaccessible," Mr. Aziz said. "Gradually, in a day or two, we will reach them."

At least 600 people were reported killed by the quake in neighboring India, and the United Nations said 2.5 million people in the entire stricken region needed shelter.

In Washington, President Bush, whose administration was criticized over its early handling of relief for victims of the Asia-Pacific tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, promised immediate help to General Musharraf, an important ally in the American-led war on terrorism. "Thousands of
people have died, thousands are wounded, and the United States of America wants to help," Mr. Bush said.

In these forested hills close to the epicenter, the quake obliterated more than this village. It also took a cornerstone of hope: The Garhi Habibullah Girls High School. In the delirious collective grief on Sunday morning, there was no way to tell how many girls had been studying here, though it was safe to say that hundreds had been, not just from Garhi Habibullah, in the North-West Frontier Province, but from villages as far as 10 miles
away, for whom this was the nearest high school for girls.
At least 20 women were teaching here - among the most educated women in the area. The dozen men digging through the rubble of the two-story school were asked how many teachers had survived. They could come up with only one name. Saturday was a school day. The men were scooping out what they could with little more than their hands. A few brought picks and shovels. One man carried a car jack, to try to help lift concrete slabs. Another peered under a pile and saw a woman's bloodied head scarf, but could do nothing to extricate the woman. By the end of the morning, the body of a longtime teacher, named Ruksana, was pulled out, preceded by her dainty green handbag. After that, the digging crew gave up. There was nothing more it could do. When would the government send machines, the men demanded to know. When would food and tents come? The village was gone, and nearly everyone had spent the night in the rain. Anger boiled up from anguish. "This village has not received any sort of help," cried Mohammed Younas, 65.
"We have nothing at present with us. Only our people are trying to dig out the children who are buried and are probably dead - probably dead."

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, General Musharraf said Pakistan desperately needed cargo helicopters to reach the most remote areas of Pakistan, medicine, and tents and blankets for the displaced. He confirmed that much of the country had not been reached.He also confirmed that Pakistan's neighbor and historical rival, India, had offered assistance, as had a host of other countries. General Musharraf said the details of India's offer would have to be ironed out. "You do understand there's a little bit of a sensitivity there," he said.

The United States Embassy in Islamabad confirmed that eight American military helicopters were due in Pakistan on Monday to help with relief efforts.

Other countries around the world sent condolences and prayers, as well as money - or pledges of money - and, more immediately, search teams with dogs, medical workers and equipment, and food and water. Supplies began flowing from fellow Muslim nations, especially those like the United Arab Emirates, where Pakistanis make up much of the work force.
 
Some countries rapidly granted Pakistanis emergency visas; in Britain, which has a large Pakistani population, a special visa desk was set up at Heathrow Airport. Prime Minister Tony Blair called the devastation "appalling."

The European Commission pledged more than $4 million in emergency aid, and said the figure could grow, as individual member nations added their own more modest offers. China, a relative newcomer as a provider of emergency aid, offered $6.2 million and sent seismologists, medical workers, search dogs and supplies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/international/asia/10quake.html?th&em

c=th

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Kashmiris Are Paying Heaviest Price in Earthquake
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: October 11, 2005

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 10 - Over the last half-century, two pitiless wars have been fought in their name. Their families have been split. They have roamed as refugees.

A dead body lay amid broken graves Monday in the destroyed town of Balakot,in the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan.

 
Widespread Destruction in Kashmir
 
A man injured in the earthquake was evacuated by volunteers on Monday in the leveled town of Balakot, in northwestern Pakistan.
Now, mercilessly enough, three days since the earth rumbled under the disputed frontier, it is Kashmiris who are paying the heaviest price. Here in hardest-hit Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, teams from the world over sought survivors under the rubble on Monday, and the first signs of aid arrived.

But it was the dead who began to make their presence felt most powerfully. To walk along the city's completely destroyed commercial thoroughfare, people found it necessary to cover their noses.

The death toll on Monday was no more precise than it was the day before, hovering somewhere around 20,000 in Pakistan, a vast majority believed to be in and around Muzaffarabad.

Across the Line of Control in the Indian sector of Kashmir, the death toll climbed sharply in the last day to more than 900, according to the state-run Press Trust of India. The Associated Press reported that the Indian authorities had air-dropped food and burial shrouds over remote villages in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

In the cross-border misery came a sliver of a political breakthrough. Pakistan on Monday accepted an offer of Indian aid for quake survivors. About 25 tons of tents, blankets, plastic sheets, food and medicines would be donated, the Indian foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, announced in New Delhi. Helicopters, which India had also offered, would not.

Asked about teaming up with Pakistan on relief duty, Mr. Saran said, "I do not see any indication yet that there could be joint operations."

Aid began trickling into Muzaffarabad on Monday, as the roads leading into the city, blocked by landslides, opened up for the first full day and Pakistani Army convoys brought in tents, blankets, rice, and powdered milk. That it was so little, and so desperately required, was evident in the melees that broke out every time an army truck approached.

Grown men clambered onto military trucks, only to be tossed out on occasion along with bags of food. Brawls broke out in the street.

Those who had survived Saturday's jolts were barely hanging on now. This would be the third night most of them would camp out on the bare ground, under an open sky full of mid-October rain. Frustrated, famished survivors, some dazed, some red with anger, said they had no water, no food.

Abdul Aziz was asked if he had fed his four children on Monday morning. "Whatever I could snatch," he replied.

On this day, it was biscuits from a shopkeeper, who then came after him with a stick. On Monday evening, he rallied around a military truck at a sports field on the edge of town, where a camp of displaced families had sprung up. He caught a brown blanket tossed into the air.

"Just this blanket, nothing else," he sullenly said of government aid. "We have only what's on our back."

At another stadium that served as ground zero for rescue and relief operations, a group of men stood at the edges waiting, for a second day in a row, for something to shelter their families at night. "Food is a faraway thing," Raja Muhammad Arif said. "We don't have tents."

Qari Muhammad Ashraf wondered how long everyone could stand the waiting. He had been given no information about when relief would come, he said, nor was he ready to give up and go back to his family.

"They are without a roof," he said. "They are having a very difficult time."

The chief military spokesman for Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, told CNN that an estimated 2.5 million people had been made homeless by the quake, which registered a magnitude of 7.6.

In the town center, the ordinary remnants of ordinary life lay in twisted, incongruous piles: a sewing machine, a street lamp, a window frame, chunks of concrete. Cars, some punched right through, some missing an entire windshield, were on the road, packed tight and leaving town.

The main road was chaotic. People carried on their shoulders whatever they could salvage: sacks of rice, bedding, suitcases, their dead.

It was only for the living that a Turkish search and a rescue team called AKUT combed the streets on Monday. In the grim tableau, Fahri Akdemir, the English speaker on the team, ticked off reasons to be optimistic: The temperatures were not so cold that people would freeze; the buildings had not ground to a fine powder, as they do after some quakes, suffocating those stuck under the rubble.

Moreover, not even 72 hours had passed since the quake: survivors could still be found.

Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/international/asia/11quake.html?th&emc=th

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AREAS OF DEVASTATION

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As Relief Lags, Injuries Fester in Quake Zone

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By DAVID ROHDE

Published: October 14, 2005
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Oct. 13 -

Nadish Liaqat, 10, was pulled from the rubble of her collapsed school on Saturday. Since then, as the death toll in her mountain town has grown into the thousands, Nadish has stared at her mother, waved her left hand and cried.
 
Kate Brooks/Polaris, for The New York Times
Zainab, who is 5, has infected flesh cut from her skull in Balakot, Pakistan, where there are few medical supplies, and no anesthetic.

Patrick Andrade/Polaris, for The New York Times
In Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, a boy brought from a remote village by helicopter was treated Thursday at a first-aid station. "She would weep a lot, but there was no voice," said Naseem Akhtar, the girl's mother. "There were tears and tears and tears."

Nadish could whisper, a little, and told her mother that she felt excruciating pain in her neck and could not move her legs or her right arm. Unable to find treatment, or even pain killers, Ms. Akhtar tried to get Nadish out on a helicopter. On Thursday, an American military helicopter finally took them from their town, Bagh, to Islamabad, ending one form of anguish and beginning another.
Doctors at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, near the Pakistani capital, said she was paralyzed. They said her rescuers might have worsened her spinal injuries; likewise her two trips to a local

hospital on a blanket. The delay in getting her to a major hospital, they added, meant she had missed an opportunity for surgery that might have eased her paralysis.

Pakistani doctors warned Thursday that the slow pace of evacuations after an earthquake devastated the region on Saturday could be costing the injured mobility, limbs or lives, and a United Nations official called for the fleet of roughly 50 helicopters involved in mountain

evacuations to be tripled in size.

The quake, measured at a magnitude of 7.6, shattered many mountain towns like Bagh, and evacuations have been slow, arduous affairs.

Pakistani officials said Thursday that 6,000 of the estimated 52,000 injured people had been evacuated. The death toll in Pakistan stood at 25,000, but officials said they still expected it to rise as reports filtered through. In India, 1,300 are said to have died, and there

have been similar complaints about delays in the rescue efforts there.

[On Friday, Pakistan called off its search for survivors to concentrate on recovering bodies, The Associated Press reported. Maj. Farooq Nasir, an army spokesman, said the chances of finding survivors were "very slim."]

In New York, Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, a senior United Nations envoy for relief efforts, called for a tripling of helicopter donations. "We need a major stepping up of air assets in a dramaticsense," Mr. Strohmeyer told The A.P.
"We need those who can provide 5 or 10 helicopters at a time rather than those who can bring in one here and one there."

After taking a helicopter tour of the devastated Kashmir region, Jan Egeland, the United Nations relief coordinator, also called for an immediate surge in aid. "This is a desperate situation," he told Agence France-Presse. "We're still racing against the clock and we need to get more helicopters, more water, more tents and more money."

At Rawalpindi General Hospital, doctors said slow evacuations have denied about 20 of their patients, many of them children, the opportunity to undergo immediate surgery for spinal injuries that might reduce their paralysis.

"The people that are coming today after five days, there is no hope of saving their limbs," said Dr. Atta Ul Haque. "They will remain paraplegic for their lives."

Gangrene- damaged limbs of at least 10 people evacuated to Islamabad in the last 24 hours have been amputated, and doctors feared many more were likely.
"Gangrene has started coming," said Dr. Shehzad Rehan, a senior administrator at the hospital. "I am expecting more."

Four Swiss helicopters arrived in Pakistan on Thursday, to join those from Pakistan's own military, the United States, Germany and Afghanistan, but injured people arriving from stricken villages reported that hundreds of other victims had been left behind.
The number of helicopters involved in the relief effort has increased gradually, from roughly 40 on Tuesday to about 50 on Thursday, according to American military officials involved in the aid effort.
Four more American helicopters are scheduled to begin operations on Friday as Pakistani and American forces search for plateaus in mountain areas where food and medicine can be dropped by parachute.

In the flattened northern town of Balakot, Pakistani military doctors said Thursday that head wounds suffered by many people, particularly children whose schoolrooms fell in on them, were becoming infected. The doctors have started treating infected head wounds without the usual anesthetics.

At one point, a doctor cut off portions of infected skin and flesh

from the head of a crying 5-year-old named Zainab as her uncle held her down.

Dr. Rehan, the hospital administrator in Rawalpindi, said that injured people who have waited days for evacuation were arriving with broken bones that had begun to heal crooked.

He said his hospital, one of a dozen treating evacuees in the Islamabad area, had rebroken and reset bones for about 170 of the 950 earthquake patients it was treating.

In a televised address on Wednesday evening, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged delays in the evacuations of trapped people and burials of the dead. But he stressed the magnitude of the disaster."It is the biggest ever tragedy we faced," he said. "All means of

communications were disrupted and roads were blocked."

Throughout the shattered region, families, finding no help coming to

them, struggled to take their wounded to help. .

On Saturday, Ms. Akhtar said, she found Nadish lying on a stretcher on the street by the school. Teachers had dug her from the school's wreckage. Nadish whispered that she could not feel her legs.

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad for this article,

and Kate Brooks from Balakot.

Courtesy:  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/international/asia/14quake.html?8hpib

[Queen Bee]

How tragic...

[susieq]

I don't know if people have ever wondered why I don't complete or answer my/any posts connected with these type of topics as Moderator here of News Articles and Headlines.The reason I do not make any personal comments is becasue I find it soooo difficult  becasue of the content.
I know maybe I should make a bit of conversation about it all in my replies, but I JUST can't.  
The best I can do, is to copy and paste, and try to keep information coming in....To do this, I of course, have to read the info through to edit and thats enough for me..   I am just a 'softy' and couldn't ever be a journalist sent on these type of missions.....Sorry  guys
Hoping some understand.....Thankyou.

[Queen Bee]

Sue, I really understand where you are coming from... It's really too much for words. It just hurts from the inside, deep down in your gut... And that kind of feeling really can't be explained. I'm usually too speechless to say much of anything as well.

I appreciate you keeping us up-to-date, because I'm not very connected with world news these days. It's important to hear about these things, and I am glad that you take the time to keep us informed.

[susieq]

Thankyou Rachel,
It was nice to receive feed-back and knows that someone close also cares and becasue of that......understands

Thankyou

[LtlPhysics]

On the news this evening, NBC, I think, they had an extended article about the people who are trying to make it through the winter high in the mountains. There were a couple of children with eye infections that could leave them blind for lack of a few drops of medicine.

[SensoVision]

these stories are pretty scary, I couldn't imagine how hard for people to live there...