MANSEHRA, Oct 9: When the earthquake struck, one Fazal Elahi thought it was the end of the world. For his family, it was. Grieving quietly next to the body of his 14-year-old daughter, Fazal recounted how his wife and brother had died when their house collapsed and how he had taken his fatally injured daughter to Mansehra Hospital.

“When the earthquake came it was like ‘Judgment Day’,” he said, recalling the horror of houses collapsing all around him.

To get to the hospital some 46 km away, he passed through Balakot, a town of around 20,000 people, where the scale of the devastation became even more apparent. “Houses in Balakot city were flattened.”

The white-bearded old man finally reached the hospital, but his daughter died in his arms as they went through the gates.

A villager from Hillkot, some 60 km from Mansehra, had a similar story — only his daughter was alive. “All houses in my village have collapsed and about 500 people are still buried under the debris,” said one Luqman after carrying his child into the hospital. His wife was killed.

Inside the hospital, medical staff was overwhelmed. Just eight doctors, helped by a similar number of nurses, struggled to cope with around 800 people crammed into wards, corridors and laid out in the courtyard.

Mansehra’s residents helped them treat victims streaming in from the outlying areas. So far 15 people had died in the hospital, but the corridors were full of talk of tragedies elsewhere in this remote part of the Northwest Frontier Province.

People spoke of hundreds of children caught by the quake as they began school in Mansehra and Balakot.

“The roads have been blocked since morning, but we have received up to 900 people,” said Dr Siddiqur Rehman as more cars carrying victims pulled up in the driving rain outside the hospital.

He said emergency services hadn’t been able to reach the villages and feared for the worst. “I fear that the casualties from nearby areas will be very high.”—Reuters