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Rescue efforts wind down in Pakistan
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-14 20:21
Rescuers searching for survivors in the rubble of
Pakistan's worst earthquake scaled back operations Friday, while aid workers
held mass burials and rushed to set up tent camps for an estimated 2 million
homeless before the harsh winter.
Kashmiri survivors of a massive earthquake,
which killed more than 35,000 people and left about 2.3 million left
homeless, wait with their injured children to be evacuated by a Pakistan
army helicopter in Bagh in Pakistani Kashmir on Friday, Oct. 14, 2005.
[AP] |
With Pakistan's death toll estimated at more than 35,000, officials said
there was virtually no hope of finding more people beneath tens of thousands of
collapsed buildings. India has reported more than 1,350 deaths on the side of
Kashmir it controls from the magnitude-7.6 quake on Oct. 8.
"We are all of the view that there is a less than 1 percent chance of
survival on the seventh day," U.N. spokesman Winston Chang said.
Most of Pakistan's deaths were in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir
where snow has already started to fall in some areas.
Jan Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary-general and emergency relief
coordinator, said millions urgently need food, medicine, shelter and blankets.
"I fear we are losing the race against the clock in the
small villages" cut off by blocked roads, Egeland said during a visit to the
devastated city of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir. "I've never
seen such devastation before."
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