The following is a firsthand account from CARE staff member Iftikhar Khan, who was among the first aid workers to reach the earthquake devastated Shangla district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
I was home in Peshawar for the weekend after spending the week in Islamabad at the CARE office. On Saturday (October 8) I was shaken awake by the earthquake that rocked Pakistan and India just before 9 a.m. I figured it was just another one of those minor earthquakes that happens here every few months. Little did I know the magnitude of this one. People flowed into the streets as the aftershocks continued. Listening to the radio, I realized that this was no ordinary earthquake - the northern parts of Pakistan were badly affected. Within a few hours, I was called by CARE's director in Pakistan and asked to represent CARE on a joint assessment team with a handful of other international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The next morning, as part of the team of four, we departed from Islamabad to the mountainous North-West Frontier Province. The drive was startling on many fronts - even the homes built of cement on the main road were cracked and damaged. Many other homes had completely collapsed and dead bodies could be seen amid the rubble. A few cranes worked on removing landslides while vehicles transported injured people to the closest hospital that was functioning. Fearing another earthquake, patients lined up outside the entrance of the hospital. The injured were treated by the six dispensers and local doctors who lived in the district of 500,000 people.
Our next stop was the Alpuri sub-district. We met the government district officer who shared with us what information he had on damage caused in the area. He reported that the earthquake came in two episodes, which probably saved them. The first shake served as an alarm so that people left their homes. The second, larger episode occurred within less than 10 minutes, by which time some had left their homes while other had returned. The second shake caused tens of thousands of houses to collapse. The mud houses could simply not withstand the quake. The mountainous topography meant that landslides were the direct result of the earthquakes.
We stayed overnight in Alpuri at the home of a local NGO staffer, Mr. Fida Hussein with the Shangla Development Society. We really didn't get any sleep though - aftershocks kept forcing us to evacuate the house. Every time we settled back into bed, another aftershock would cause us to jolt out of our sheets and run out again. Around 3:30 a.m. on a chilly fall night, we noticed people in the neighborhood trying to sleep outside. In my immediate view, I saw no women. When I looked more closely behind the bushes, there were the women - protecting themselves from cold and trying to maintain some privacy. No one dared sleep in houses that had been cracked or damaged.
On the second day, the team visited Khuz Kana village, which was 80 percent destroyed. Every area we went to looked the same - buildings and homes destroyed, and people desperately searching for their loved ones. One man we spoke to had lost four children and his wife. The sight of people carrying wooden gurneys with the injured was also commonplace and the doctors were too few. To worsen the situation, the village hospital had also collapsed. Three bulldozers worked in the area all day clearing the rubble caused by landslides - a task that felt like it was never going to end.
In the afternoon, as we were driving to our next destination, we saw a vehicle tumbled over in a landslide. Who was inside? Were there survivors? We didn't know. We proceeded to visit Shahpur, a village at the top of a small hill. The houses were built in a staggered pattern, which essentially meant that if one house fell, the remaining buildings on the hill would collapse like dominoes, which is exactly what happened.
When people learned that I was an aid worker, they pulled me by the arm to show me their home. They said we were the first ones to come and they desperately needed our help. "We are grateful that someone wants to know, to help," they told me. I can't explain the hollowness I felt in my stomach while I was seeing these people. Sometimes feelings cannot be put into words. When you meet a person who has fed his family, built his home, and now is down on all fours digging through the rubble to see what's left of his entire life's work - we couldn't even discuss it among ourselves. Despite this, we needed to do something. My job was to work with my colleagues and figure out how best to reach them.
As we went on to the village of Burkana, we saw the same situation again. Eighty-five percent of the area was destroyed. People lost the little food, money, clothes and goods they owned. People that already had so little now had nothing; not even shovels to dig through the rubble. Everything was under something else. There was so much destruction that you didn't know who was alive and dead. What struck me was how some of the most vulnerable and poor had been affected the most. If you build a house of rocks and don't have enough cement to seal it well, an earthquake can destroy it.
With all the death and destruction, the public health risk is increasing daily. Pneumonia and diarrhea are feared to be on the rise. Rescue operations are slow due to road conditions, and delays are compounded by the weather. Torrential rains have hampered some relief efforts while people lined the streets sleeping in the cold and rain without tents, blankets or clean water. CARE quickly concluded that our intervention would need to include a distribution of temporary shelter materials, such as tents and plastic sheeting, comforters and safe water solution to ensure clean drinking water.
