SCRAMBLE FOR QUAKE SURVIVORS
Pakistan rescuers combing through toppled buildings to reach victims as death toll rises
RESCUERS battled along badly damaged roads and combed through toppled buildings on Wednesday to reach victims of an earthquake that killed at least 38 people and injured hundreds more in northeast Pakistan.
Authorities were still assessing the quake’s impact in villages around the city of Mirpur in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, but the immediate damage was evident.
After a night of heavy rain compounded the misery of survivors, hundreds gathered to attend the funerals of residents killed near Mirpur, about 130km southeast of the capital, Islamabad.
“It was like doomsday for us. We lost a number of our near and dear ones,” Muhammad Azam said at a funeral for a neighbour. “Our loved ones will never come back.”
The 5.2-magnitude quake was not as strong as several that had struck Pakistan over the years, but the epicentre was very shallow, which often causes more damage.
Near Mirpur, a well-developed city known for its palatial residences, many roads were destroyed, while bridges, mobile phone towers and electricity poles were also badly damaged.
The village of Jatlan on the outskirts of Mirpur appeared to be one of the worst affected. Here, residents sifted through debris and assessed the damage, with large cracks defacing walls in the houses that still stood, and brick fences reduced to rubble.
Pakistan’s military continued to lead search-and-rescue operations and the death toll continued to rise as authorities reached remote villages to assess the damage.
Muhammad Tayyab Chaudhry, the top local official, said at least 37 people had been killed — 33 in Mirpur and four in the neighbouring district of Bhimber.
Lieutenant-General Mohammad Afzal of the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) said one person had been killed in the nearby Punjabi city of Jhelum.
“Some 350 people were wounded, 80 of them critically.”
Teams of doctors had arrived in the area, while NDMA had sent hundreds of tents, bottles of water and food rations.
Afzal said hundreds of houses had been damaged, 136 of them “completely”, while 14km of road were “badly affected”. Engineers were rushing to make repairs.
Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan gave a higher injury toll of 500 and said survivors would be offered compensation.
In Mirpur, life was quickly returning to normal and most of the well-built structures in the city showed little sign of damage.
Mirpur owes its prosperity to thousands of former residents who migrated to Britain in the 1960s, but retained their links to the area, repatriating money to buy land and build plush homes. Many of its 450,000 residents are dual British-Pakistan nationals.
The quake sent people in Lahore and Islamabad running into the streets, while tremors were also felt as far away as New Delhi.
Pakistan straddles the boundary where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet, making it susceptible to earthquakes.
Pakistani geologists faulted the “poor construction of shanty houses in Jatlan” for some of the damage, as well as its location near a fault line and the shallowness of the quake.
The country was hit by a 7.6magnitude quake in 2005 that killed more than 73,000 people and left 3.5 million homeless.