Tents crisis hits quake victims
Bureau Report

MUZAFFARABAD—Only the heaviest tents will protect against the brutal Kashmiri winter. There are not enough warm tents in the world to protect refugees from the South Asia earthquake from the coming winter, a top UN official has warned. Andrew Macleod told reporters that the emergency was so vast it was an even bigger challenge than the 2004 tsunami.
He said the problem was growing every day, and was “outside the scope of any government to handle”. The warning came amid a dispute between Pakistan and India over an Indian offer of helicopters to aid relief work.
Pakistan said it would accept the Indian army aircraft, but not their pilots or crew. Good weather has allowed helicopter relief efforts to resume, but 20% of the areas worst-hit may still not have been reached.
Nine days after the earthquake hit Kashmir and parts of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, at least two million people are still homeless and at the mercy of the weather, aid officials warn. Mr Macleod, operations manager of the UN Emergency Response Team working out of Islamabad, said winter-weight tents were needed to protect people from the “cold and brutal winter” to come.
But he warned: “The need here is greater than the existence of tents in the world. We need more tents than exist”. Deaths in Pakistani-run Kashmir alone may exceed 40,000, local officials say.
Sikander Hayat Khan, the regional prime minister, said he believed that up to 70,000 had also been injured. If confirmed, the new death figures would bring the total to 54,000 in all areas affected by the quake.
Pakistan’s government puts the overall number of deaths in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and NWFP at about 40,000. Mr Macleod said while many refugees were converging on centres like Islamabad and Rawalpindi, many others could not make such a journey, over several mountain ranges, when roads had been blocked or swept away in landslides.
He said the relief operation was “mobilising every possible resource” to reach such people, “from massive helicopters to feet”, and including mules. But he said the challenge was bigger than after the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, or even the 2004 tsunami. From first light on Monday, under clear skies, helicopters were flying in and out of Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, once again after two days of disruption due to storms at the weekend.