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You are here: UUSC >Rights in Humanitarian Crises > South Asia Earthquake Relief > Earthquake Situation Report |
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| Rights in Humanitarian Crisis: South Asia Earthquake | |||
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Situation update 10/26/05 The situation for many people affected by the earthquake is desperate. The roads and bridges are impassable, and winter is implacably setting in, cutting off isolated areas from any assistance. Many affected villages still have not been reached and people have set out on foot to seek aid. There is massive displacement of people in the rugged mountainous regions, and helicopters — the only means of finding survivors — are often grounded because of bad weather. Nor do the pilots necessarily know where people have gone in search of help. Small groups of sick and wounded people are wandering around in the mountains trying to get help. The crisis in Pakistan is still so acute that people in isolated areas who do not receive assistance or make their way to assistance in the next two weeks may not survive the oncoming winter. After talking with several people working on the ground, UUSC has hired a consultant from Pakistan who has worked for several years in the area. The consultant has been working to identify three to five national and local organizations as partners for immediate UUSC grants. The partner groups will have a particular focus on:
The first group to which we are granting funds is Walkabout Development Solutions (WDS). They have taken the creative step of forming "quake jumper" teams — five teams of two local people who are familiar with the terrain. They are using funds provided by UUSC to equip these teams with satellite phones to go into the remote areas in the mountains (for a week at a time), locate people, provide them with some lightweight cover, ponchos, and special blankets, and call in helicopters. Their immediate goal is to locate and bring to assistance as many people as possible who have not yet gotten to any aid. Click here for an on-the-ground
update from a WDS worker.
Situation update 10/18/05 The situation in the Himalayan regions of Pakistan and India remains desperate. The relief effort has still not reached over one-fifth of the villages badly hit by the earthquake, because roads and bridges are out – and because the relief effort cannot meet the magnitude of the need. People are dying of exposure and untreated wounds. Thousands are living out in the open in their destroyed villages, without adequate food, water, or medical care in rapidly dropping temperatures and frequent rainstorms. There simply are not enough doctors, tents, blankets, and medical supplies going out to people yet. It is essential to step up the aid distribution effort now. UUSC has identified four Pakistani nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are disbursing relief by truck and helicopter to remote villages and have organized emergency hospital camps in Mansehra and Balakot. They are being staffed with doctors flown in from other parts of Pakistan. The wounded are being brought to those camps from remote villages, as Islamabad hospitals are now overflowing. Many villagers are walking their wounded in 10 to 20 miles to these medical centers. The first priority is treating the children. One Pakistani NGO we’re working with has received two donated helicopters; this organization has a history in the region and knows the communities in the more remote areas.
I spoke with Javed Malick, an NGO worker in sustainable development who has worked in Pakistan-administered Kashmir with Islamic Relief, and with Abdul Khan, a Pakistani living in the United States who has been in contact with people in Pakistan. I heard from both of them that the situation in Pakistan is desperate. The two northern provinces in Pakistan are the most seriously affected, and within those provinces, the following areas are most badly hit:
The earthquake also affected India, in the Kashmir province, and western Afghanistan. Geography and need The area hit badly by the earthquake is highly mountainous, outside of the several large towns and cities. It is populated by a many small villages dispersed all over the mountains and linked in by a network of very basic roads. Many of those roads have now collapsed, been wiped out by landslides, or end at destroyed bridges. NGO personnel I spoke to in Pakistan fear that the death tolls will keep rising, as there are still a very large number of villages hit by the earthquake that it is impossible to reach by road, only by helicopter.
And there
are just not enough helicopters. Many helicopters are being used
to ferry the injured from the northern towns to Islamabad.
Thirty hospitals were destroyed by the earthquake in the
northern
provinces,
with many doctors and nurses killed and equipment destroyed. So
while field hospitals have been set up in Abbotabad and Manshera,
the majority of the injured are being sent by helicopter to
Islamabad, where the hospitals are overrun. Devastated and displaced There are roughly a half-million people in each of the districts most affected, Mansehra District in NWFP and Muzaffarabad and Bagh in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Estimates are that in most settlements in those areas, 70 to 80 percent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed. This means that the entire local government and governance structures are also destroyed, no offices are working, and government workers are dead, dispersed, injured, or displaced. The same goes for social services, local government, NGOs, community organizations, and so on. It is a situation of chaos, and there’s no coordination of aid: where should they start? what should they do? The people need everything — immediate shelter, food, water. And now there’s also the fear of disease. I learned that when rescue and aid teams got to Balakot (a tourist center of 50,000 in the NWFP) one-and-a-half days after the earthquake, no one was there; people were dead or had gone to neighboring communities for help. Once aid workers set up there, however, people began to drift back. Local infrastructure is destroyed, and people are dispersed: families have been split up, people are seeking shelter with others, the injured have been flown to Islamabad — the situation is very bad. The largest population sector killed seems to be school-age children from the age of five to late teens, who were killed by the uniform collapse of schools that were not built with the simple earthquake-resistant techniques that are now commonplace all over the world. Many other children have been orphaned or separated from their families and are currently unaccompanied. Mobilizing aid There are several community-based organizations in the areas formed with the help of international and Pakistani NGOs. But their infrastructure is destroyed, their communications are down, their people are dispersed, and it is not yet possible to get to many of the villages where these organizations are located. NGOs are trying to contact the community organizations as they travel to the area. Islamic Relief has been in the region for many years and has five offices in the affected area and a lot of contacts with the community-based organizations there. They have offered to facilitate our contact with groups in the area. Over 30 countries worldwide have responded generously. But there will be a lot to do for the next several years, as the affected areas will need new roads, schools, everything. UUSC is in contact with several organizations on the ground in Pakistan and India to determine the most effective use of our funds and expertise. |
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