”The first thought that came to my mind was that someone is bulldozing our house,” wrote a blogger from Islamabad, Pakistan, close to the epicentre of Saturday’s massive South Asian earthquake that killed up to 40 000 people.
”The tremors, I think, remained for at least four to five minutes, and they were so severe that the walls of the house were literally moving. I had placed a picture frame in an inward window; it fell due to moving walls and windows,” wrote the blogger.
”I woke up at around 8.50am, due to severe tremors, never reported to such an extent and timespan before in Islamabad … Many people are buried and still help is needed in the collapsed wing of Margallah Towers. Please don’t forget to pray for them and all other affectees.”
The powerful earthquake that ripped through Pakistan, Afghanistan and India on Saturday morning measured 7,6 on the Richter scale. It killed up to 40 000 people and injured at least 60 000 people. According to the United Nations, more than 2,5-million are in need of shelter.
Stories depicting poignant pictures of the devastating quake in Pakistan have already emerged from bloggers in the country, who have frantically been documenting their experiences and describing the conditions in various cities in and around Pakistan.
”It’s almost 43 hours gone now, when we first felt the jolting tremors — tremors that ripped apart the natural assets of our country,” said Asma Mirza from Islamabad in a blog early on Monday.
”The beautiful and loving people of our northern areas, Kashmir, part of NWFP [the North West Frontier province] and Punjab, Islamabad are in distress. There are many fatalities and casualties; unofficially they are up to 50 000,” wrote Mirza.
”Air is getting colder and colder, due to rains in all affected regions … It’s really heartbreaking to see many mothers crying for their children … children yearning for their parents and siblings.
”I feel like crying when I think again and again how parents would gather energy to regain their lives with all or some of their children departed; [or] how a child would ever gain the vigour to restart their lives sans their beloved mother and father,” Mirza said.
Blogger Punk Dervish, an engineer formerly from the United States who is currently studying in Pakistan, wrote: ”I was jolted out of deep slumber by the tremors. I jumped on my feet at once, fighting off the giddiness while coping with the trembling ground and the furniture around me. I quickly rushed outdoors along with my mother, whom I had spotted in front of the TV, frozen with shock.
”As I write this, I just experienced the ground shaking beneath my feat and I can see the chandeliers quivering. I hope that we escape through this calamity unscathed,” he said.
Mie Ahmt (31), from Kabul, Afghanistan, wrote on her blog: ”First, it [the tremors] was just a little bit — but then it got worse … Everything was shaking — so we all went outside and stood there for a while.”
”It’s been two days, and the shock has yet to sink in,” writes another blogger.
A blogger from Lahore, called Lieutenant Purple Balloon, wrote: ”I was sitting on the same bed, reading for class, and the furniture began to shake. It only took a moment to realise that the tremor wasn’t a synapse firing off a memory, but a quaking growing stronger as I leapt off my bed calling for my father, my sister in tow.
”But what I cannot shake from my mind is an image of a man buried to his neck, being dug out of the rubble, his forehead bloodied. Bundles of what were people only hours before being rushed to ambulances. The dusty feet and bloody knees … poking out of the back of a dabba van as it drives off, an attendant gently pressing the man’s ankle down because he kept trying to bend his knee. Feet run over broken concrete, people standing around the broken building, drifting and confused.
”We have all been thrust into a shocked displacement, a confused wonderment as to how exactly this happened,” he wrote.
”I am making another phone call, this time to cry with a friend for her loss; a nation is hushed, whispering a prayer … mourning for its sudden dead, one bright autumn day in October.”