Quake villagers await tents as winter sets in

BHERI—With winter starting to set in, some survivors of Pakistan’s earthquake are without shelter, sufficient food or warm clothing nearly eight weeks after the disaster struck, aid officials said on Wednesday.
The first heavy snow fell across the region at the weekend but while there has been no spike in the mortality rate, more deaths were inevitable unless aid reaches victims soon, aid officials said.
The focus of the relief effort was shifting toward food, even though shelters were still needed, said Jean-Philipe Bourgeois, a field coordinator for the International Organization for Migration (IOM). “It’s a combined problem. Not only food, not only shelter, but both.” The October 8 earthquake killed 73,000 people, most of them in Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province. Aid officials fear sickness sweeping through a cold and poorly nourished population will cause a second wave of deaths. But a U.N. spokesman said there are deaths in the region every winter from cold-related ailments and it would be alarmist to talk of a second wave of fatalities from the cold now.
Chief U.N. humanitarian coordinator Jan Vandemoortele said reports of deaths brought on by the cold since the harsh weather began were incorrect. “We have compared data in hospitals. We don’t see any difference in the number of people that died in Muzaffarabad last week as the same week last year,” Vandemoortele said in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir.
But he said diseases such as respiratory tract infections would increase. “Nobody can deny, and nobody will deny, that we are facing a very difficult situation.” Haroonur Rasheed, a resident of a mountain village to the north of Muzaffarabad, said the seven members of his family are sleeping rough, without a tent. “We know tents are a rare commodity but if we don’t get one
we’re sure to die of the cold,” said Rasheed while waiting, along with a crowd of other villagers, at a helicopter landing pad at the village of Bheri. Rasheed said he had been coming down from his village to Bheri every day in the hope of getting a tent from the relief helicopters that make regular drops there. But these days, the helicopters are mostly bringing in food, blankets and tarpaulins on behalf of the U.N. World Food Programme and the IOM.
Rasheed and others said they had been supplied with food, but with the arrival of the cold weather, it was shelter they were most concerned about. “We’re living in a shed we have made from straw but that’s not going to work in the rain and snow. We urgently need shelter,” said Mohammad Sain, who was also waiting for a tent. An official of the International Committee of the Red Cross said she had taken a relief flight on Tuesday to some high-altitude areas where it was below freezing and snowing at noon.
“This was a very poor area where little aid has reached so far,” ICRC spokeswoman Jessica Barry said. “Women and children were walking around barefoot.”
Pakistan has won pledges worth more than $6 billion from world donors for relief and reconstruction operations in the quake-hit zone. Most of that was earmarked for long-term reconstruction. U.N. and other aid officials say funds are short for a six-month emergency operation to keep survivors alive over the winter. A moderate earthquake of magnitude five struck mountainous northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday but there were no reports of casualties or damage, the meteorological department said.—Agencies.