Aftershock rattles Pak quake survivors

An injured Kashmiri girl Ramila Niaz (R) weeps in an army helicopter as she looks at her collapsed house in Ziarat, 25 km southeast of Muzaffarabad yesterday. PHOTO: AFP

The aftershock, at around 2 a.m. (1700 EDT), measured 5.3 magnitude on the US Geological Survey's sensors. Local meteorological officials said there were 70 aftershocks in a 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday, and the seismic activity was likely to continue for months and maybe years.

People who had been sleeping on the pavement in the Pakistani Kashmir capital leapt to the middle of the road, eyeing what was left of buildings warily before eventually drifting back.

The aftershocks added to the misery of an estimated 3.3 million people affected by the quake, more than a million of them without homes and in desperate need of food and water but also tents and mobile latrines. The approach of winter was a worry.

"This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography. An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse," the UN's top emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland told Reuters in an interview.

"So it's a nightmare in trying to reach now, community after community which are homeless, roofless, without food, without water. It is this race against time I fear we are now losing for many of these outlying villages.

The official death toll of 25,000 in Pakistani Kashmir is expected to rise. Some local officials and politicians say deaths could exceed 40,000. Another 1,200 died in Indian Kashmir.

The army has been airdropping supplies to villages cut off from help in remote valleys of the Himalayan foothills of Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province.

Where valleys were too narrow and steep-sided for helicopters to fly, mule-trains are being sent to carry in the food, blankets and tents people will need to survive.

But for the villagers, mules and airdrops were a temporary and unsatisfactory step -- they were looking for assurances they were not going to be cut off for the winter.

Abdul Hamid, a district elder who walked four days and nights to reach Muzaffarabad from the village of Sardari in the Neelum valley, said the destruction was in fact not too severe but food and supplies were running out.

"We are very worried about how we can come in and out through the winter. The snows are on the mountain already and if we are cut off, thousands will die for sure," he said.