ISLAMABAD, 14 October 2005 — Five days after a massive earthquake hit northern Pakistan, rescuers yesterday gave up the search for survivors in Muzaffarabad. As night set in, rescue teams were packing their bags in the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir which was almost completely leveled.
“We worked hard but the site had become too dangerous so we had to leave it,” said Daniel Davis, a member of a British team that struggled for half a day to save a 20-year-old woman they believed to be alive beneath a collapsed house here. “It was terrible, as if we had abandoned her.”
But many frantic survivors refused to lose hope, especially the parents of hundreds of children who were buried alive beneath their schools. Some continued to dig with their bare hands throughout the day.
“I have found one of the bodies of one of their friends but there is only a 10 percent chance that my sons are alive,” said Man Sabar Naqui, 50, who was looking for his two sons aged six and seven.
In the northern town of Balakot, North West Frontier Province Education Minister Fazle Ali said 400 girls were “trapped” in the ruins of one school. “About 400 girls students are still trapped. Only 40 bodies have been recovered during the past two or three days at the government school,” he said.
Russian and South Korean teams worked throughout the day in Muzaffarabad, while Spanish and Dutch teams were also refusing to give up at a collapsed school in the Kashmiri town of Bagh.
“There is little chance of finding anyone alive but still there is a sliver of hope and that’s why we’re working,” said Andrei Fiodorov, a Russian team member with a sniffer dog. “When the excavators are being used it means there is no hope anymore.”
But the army was doing just that, bringing in heavy earth-moving equipment to parts of the ravaged Himalayan city. “We have done what we could manually. Now we need a machine to clear the dead bodies,” said an army officer in charge of one of the clearing operations.
Pakistani troops struggled to reach remote mountain villages cut off since the quake, as powerful aftershocks set off panic among millions of homeless and traumatized survivors.
Desperately needed supplies were beginning to arrive in devastated northeast Pakistan but not nearly enough to feed, clothe and shelter some 2.5 million people who have been sleeping out in the cold and rain since Saturday.
Stunned villagers also poured out of the mountains into the devastated cities of Pakistani Kashmir in search of aid, forced to leave behind their dead and injured in remote settlements where rescuers have not yet set foot.
“We are worried for them. We’re taking food and supplies with us. We can’t reach them by road so we have to use helicopter,” said a Pakistani Army colonel in charge of one of the units moving higher into the mountains.
United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland flew in to see the aftermath of the earthquake at first hand. “This is a desperate situation. As you can see we are making progress in the more populated areas but it is so hard to reach the others,” he said after a helicopter tour of the disaster zone.
“We’re still racing against the clock and we need to get more helicopters, more water, more tents and more money.” But he rejected complaints from destitute and injured survivors that the response by UN and Pakistani agencies was too slow.
“It is not slow. The first three or four days there weren’t even (open) roads here,” he said. “In the pipeline we have 10,000 tents and 100,000 blankets but it takes time to go to these areas.”
— Additional input from agencies
