The Sandspur

Issue date: 10/21/05 Section: News

Media Credit: Timothy Smith/KRT CAMPUS AFTERMATH: Pakistanis watch from atop a pile of rubble, as supplies are unloaded from a U.S. Navy helicopter in a remote village of Northern Pakistan.

As temperatures drop to 37 degrees and the snow begins to fall in Pakistan, the numbers of the dead from the 7.6 earthquake that thundered through the South Asia last week are skyrocketing.

The latest figure on the dead according to the New York Times is 38,000 with 62,000 injured and over 2.5 million left homeless, a number that will soon soar as the remote villages have yet to be searched.

A major roadblock to the search and rescue process is that there is simply no where to put the masses of people streaming into Muzaffarabad in Kashmir. These injured have been arriving by helicopters, private cars, taxis and on relatives backs to get to the medical center, where the French nongovernmental aid group service D'Aide Medicale Urgente has a staff of only 47, in addition to the local hospital which has six beds.

As a result of the earthquake, 26 hospitals have been destroyed or are simply too dangerous to open back up in the city in addition to the over 600 health clinics throughout the country. Those who made it to the medical center lie in lines by the stairs with numbers on their heads which indicate the gravity of their case; III signifies they need a helicopter out and a II or a I means they can wait up to 24 hours in the open area.

The high influx of injured people worries aid workers, who fear that these numbers can only reflect the amount of people who "remain out in the inaccessible areas without medical help." On Oct. 15 and 16, morning rescue missions in the remote villages were delayed because of the heavy clouds and rains which seem to be an epidemic occurrence with both the South Asia earthquake and the Guatemala hurricane.

The Pakistanis government estimates the cost of the quake reaching $5 billion, in a country where the GDP is only 343.7 billion. The United States has been quoted saying that "recovery could take up to ten years."

Pakistan is a country that is noted by the CIA World Fact book for "frequent earthquakes, and a major environmental issue of water pollution from raw sewage, and limited access to natural fresh water resources."

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