Rain adversely hampers aid efforts
By Ali Imran

ISLAMABAD—Heavy rain from late Saturday night has compounded the miseries of survivors of last week’s earthquake, disrupted aid flights and threatened more landslides on roads the army has been struggling to clear.
Relief officials were still trying to assess the scale of the disaster while trying to bring in help before winter sets in. “Desperation,” the operations manager of the UN relief effort, Robert Holden, said of the effect of the rain on victims, most of whom were in Azad Kashmir. “Many people are out without shelter. It was miserable to start with but with these things are only going to get worse,” he told journalists.
“Our helicopter operations are grounded. We are not moving casualties, not moving relief supplies by air. Obviously we have still got land transportation corridors running but there is a danger of further landslides.”
Hundreds of villages are still inaccessible by road, cut off after the quake triggered landslides that either swept away mountain roads or blocked them. One section of road the army had managed to clear was blocked by a fresh landslide on Saturday, Holden said.
“We have also got the danger of further collapse of buildings; a very, very difficult situation made even worse by the rain.”
Altaf Musani, a senior World Health Organisation disaster official, said efforts to provide medical aid were being impeded by rain. It also made it more likely that disease could spread due to poor sanitation.
“The sanitation situation is quite serious, even in existing health facilities, so we need to set up a system, dig latrines, encourage hygiene,” Musani said.
“We need supplies, we need to coordinate. Helicopters are key to it. We need to get people out to the periphery,” he said. The earthquake was one of the worst in South Asia in recorded history. Muzaffarabad, capital of the AJK was devastated. Military officials estimate up to 70 per cent of its buildings have either collapsed or have become uninhabitable.
The civil administration has completely disintegrated, with personnel dead, injured or preoccupied with burying their own dead and looking after their families. The United Nations has estimated that more than a million people were made homeless by the disaster.
The Pakistani army, widely criticised for a slow initial response to the disaster, has been evacuating the injured by helicopter from mountain villages to Muzaffarabad and on down to the lowlands.
Injured people are still being brought in some with gangrene, Musani said.
Thousands have left on their own, travelling to the country lowlands to stay with family and friends, but many people remain and they have been joined by survivors from devastated villages.