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Rescue hopes fade after Pakistan quake
10/14/2005
MUZAFFARABAD, (Pakistan), Oct 13: Hope was running out Thursday for finding more survivors of Pakistan's massive earthquake even though vast isolated stretches of the lower Himalayas remain cut off, officials said, report agencies.
In some parts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir which was almost completely levelled, heavy earth-moving equipment began clearing rubble as attention turned to bringing relief to survivors.
UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination official Alain Pasche said that the decision whether to end the search for survivors rested with the Pakistani government.
But villagers who kept pouring into the major population centers of northern Pakistan said that no search teams made it to mountain regions razed by Saturday's earthquake of 7.6 on the Richter scale.
In the remote town of Bagh, an AFP reporter said rescue teams were still looking through the rubble of a collapsed school for hundreds of boys and girls who have been missing since the quake.
Army Major Khalid Hussain said he could not count the dead in the town.
Officials have put the toll at 23,000 dead across Pakistan with another 2.5 million homeless. The quake also killed 1,329 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, police said.
Despite the dimming hopes of survivors, the British volunteer team Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) continued the search for a 20-year-old woman they believed to be alive under a collapsed house in Muzaffarabad's old city.
Team leader Garry de la Pomerai said they had worked late into the night but the structure was unsteady and part of their tunneling had collapsed.
Meanwhile: Pakistan Thursday upped the official death toll from last week's massive earthquake to more than 25,000, with some 63,000 injured.
The 7.6-magnitude quake devastated large swathes in the country's north and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir when it struck on Saturday morning.
The United Nations Children's Fund earlier estimated the number of people killed in the quake at between 30,000 and 40,000, but this has not been confirmed by Pakistani officials.
Meanwhile: Thousands of Islamabad residents poured onto the streets Thursday amid rumours of an imminent earthquake less than a week after a devastating tremor north of the Pakistani capital, witnesses said.
People ran out of schools, offices and their homes in the middle of the day after rumours that quickly spread over the telephone by anonymous callers.
Fears began to subside and people trickled back indoors after seismologists went on local television repeatedly to dismiss the scare-mongering.
The scare followed a jolt measuring 5.6 on the Richter Scale hours earlier in the middle of the night that caused panic in Islamabad and other areas.
On Saturday, an earthquake registering 7.6 crushed vast mountain areas north of Islamabad, killing at least 23,000 people in Pakistan and more than 1,300 in India.
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