Pakistan said on Saturday the death toll from the region’s massive earthquake has reached 38 000 people, a jump of 13 000, with about 3,3-million people homeless ahead of the Himalayan winter.
Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said 38 000 people were dead and 62 000 people were injured one week after the earthquake of 7,6 on the Richter scale ravaged the northern mountains of South Asia.
”There are 38 000 dead in the earthquake,” Sherpao said.
”It may still go up,” he said. ”It is a colossal tragedy.”
The number of homeless was far up from the previous estimate of 2,5-million. Officials had earlier put the death toll at 25 000 and the injured at 63 000.
”Some 3,3-million people have been made homeless. Their houses have either been destroyed or damaged,” Sherpao said.
The October 8 earthquake also ravaged the Indian side of divided Kashmir, killing 1 329 people there, according to Indian police.
Sherpao gave the new toll as the relief effort for Pakistan’s worst natural disaster to date was hampered again by poor weather.
Heavy rain brought misery to victims and presented another obstacle for soldiers and aid agencies racing against time to get food, blankets and shelter to remote mountain villages.
Rescue operations were all but abandoned on Friday as hopes of finding anyone alive in the rubble faded, allowing bulldozers to move in and demolish the piles of wreckage across Pakistani Kashmir.
The Pakistani military has not called off an end to the search, but the top United Nations relief official Jan Egeland said on Friday the ”cruel reality” was that more survivors were unlikely to be found.
Egeland said the rush of aid could hinder relief for the most desperate survivors, as so many trucks were trying to get through a road network that was torn to pieces by the massive quake.
Some villages remain cut off high in the mountains, with just weeks to go before the harsh winter sets in.
”The government has been maximising its effort to reach the affected area to provide rescue and relief to people there,” Sherpao said.
Pakistan’s disaster response chief, Major General Farooq Javed, said again that there was no guarantee the millions of homeless would all be sheltered by winter.
”We will try, so that as many people as possible are in some kind of shelter, but we can’t promise all will be under tents,” Javed told Geo television.
”So, the back-up plan is to ask all agencies to procure whatever possible — no matter what, even plastic sheets, the thick ones, and use them as some kind of protection for all the people who may not have shelter of any kind.” — AFP
