ISLAMABAD, Dec 2: Eight weeks after the South Asian earthquake, efforts to stop thousands of Pakistani survivors dying during the bitter Himalayan winter are on a knife’s edge, the United Nations said on Friday.
The UN’s emergency coordinator in Pakistan, Jan Vandemoortele, said aid had reached some victims of the Oct 8 disaster but warned that complacency was a bigger enemy than the weather and the rugged terrain.
A UN official in charge of providing shelter, Darren Boisvert, also warned that 90 per cent of the 420,000 tents handed out were not ready for winter, although survivors were strengthening them with plastic sheets and blankets.
“The situation remains very difficult and indeed we are on a knife’s edge,” Vandemoortele told a news conference.
There were just not enough winter tents in the world to meet the need and people now had to be helped to build their own shelter out of the ruins of their old homes, Boisvert said.
The immediate goal was to get 10,000 winter shelter kits to people living at altitudes above 5,000 feet. The kits include corrugated iron sheeting and other basic building material.
“The reason for this is quite simple. The more people that we can properly shelter in these upper elevations means that less people will move down ... into camps below,” he said.
“Our main focus it to keep people in their homes,” he said.
Most survivors want to stay on their land with their animals but thousands have trekked out of the mountains to towns in the foothills where crowded, unsanitary tent camps have sprung up.
“I tried to rebuild my house and give my cattle shelter but I don’t have building material and I couldn’t get a tent,” said one man taking his family down from their mountain home to the low land.
PRIORITIES: The three biggest priorities were to provide heating for freezing families; corrugated iron sheets so quake victims can build their own shelter, and winterised tents, Vandemoortele said.
He said there were encouraging aspects to the aid effort but massive problems remained, adding: “We have got two versions of the story, of the glass being half full and half empty.”
People were starting to rebuild thanks to government compensation and thousands of tents had been distributed, but many were not designed to withstand the bitter winter that began last weekend, he said.
Emergency food stocks were being built up, but rations had been cut so they could last longer. Schools had restarted, but many were in tents where students had to battle against the cold, he added.
He said that while there had been no disease epidemics and immunisation campaigns were underway, there had been a number of cases of pneumonia and diarrhoea.
Meanwhile, funding for the UN’s flash appeal of 550-million for emergency aid had increased over the last month but it was still only 41 per cent funded after two months.
Vandemoortele said “nobody should be carried away” by the figures for how much aid had been handed out to survivors.
“Irrational exuberance about these numbers would be unwise, in fact it could be deadly,” he added. “We need continued cash and cooperation to get the job done.”
Vandemoortele added: “The worst enemies we face are not the mountains and not the winter, the worst enemies we face are complacency and pessimism.”
Boisvert, who works for the International Office of Migration, told the conference that 90 per cent of the tents “are not winterized”.
But Vandemoortele stressed that most people were using blankets, tarpaulins and whatever else they could lay their hands on to bring their tents up to standard to get through the winter.
“When we say that 90 per cent of tents are winterized, it does not mean that they are inadequate, the proportion of tents that is not adequate is much, much smaller,” he said.
“Keeping the people dry, keeping the people warm, well-fed and healthy remains a colossal job,” he added.
A huge aid effort involving Pakistani authorities, the United Nations, the Red Cross and numerous aid groups, has been trying to ensure survivors get proper shelter and adequate food to survive the winter.
Tents have been delivered to mountain villages by helicopter, truck, on donkeys and on foot in the eight weeks since the quake struck.
Speaking earlier, Vandemoortele said towns such as Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir, could not take in any more people seeking shelter. “If the people come down from the valleys by the hundreds and thousands, we will face a major challenge,” he said. “The population of the city is already bigger than it has ever been, it is over full. There is no space for additional camps.”
While there had been no outbreaks of epidemics or increase in mortality among survivors since the winter began to bite a week ago, conditions for the spread of disease were ripe.
“Acute respiratory infection, in particular, is the biggest concern we have and that is why we focus so much on shelter.”—AFP/Reuters
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