KARACHI, Oct 24: Eight more families comprising 69 people have arrived in the city from an earthquake-devastated village, Basant Kot, near Muzaffarabad. They travelled by bus and arrived at Patel Para, where a local welfare organization had initially arranged for their board and lodging. Subsequently, these families were shifted to their relatives living in different localities of the city.

Taking to Dawn, members of these families said that many others survivors of the earthquake had started leaving their devastated areas and a substantial number were likely to arrive in the city within a fortnight.

Basant Kot is a village with a few hundred houses, located at a two-hour drive from the capital of Azad Kashmir. The area has been vanished by the powerful quake and disconnected from Muzaffarabad. The quake affected families, stranded in the open with their houses razed to the ground, left their hometown on Oct 20 after they lost all hopes of relief aid.

The quake victims have started to travel to several cities and the direction of many of them is towards the commercial city of Karachi. Most of the quake victims, who have arrived here and cannot scratch the nerve-wrecking moments out of their memory, appear frightened of intermittent aftershocks in their valley. They are not willing to go back at least for the next six months of freezing cold. They are of the view that if the government extends a helping hand in rebuilding their houses and providing other basic facilities, they may make up their mind to go back.

Among 69 people who arrived here is Mohammad Hanif, 30, a mason. He has lost his son, a brother and a sister in the natural calamity. Hanif said when he came to veranda in his house, he felt tremors. Suddenly, the tremors intensified and his house fell down. He hardly could save one of his brothers.

He said that the village, he lived in, located in the lap of mountains and soon after the quake, heavy rocks started rolling down the mountains and the atmosphere filled with dust. “The visibility became zero and we could only hear shrieks and cries of children and women. It was horrible and I cannot express it in words,” Hanif added.

“One of the heavy rocks hit my brother Zakir, who died on the spot. People started running for their lives. I hardly gathered my son, daughter and wife and ran towards a nearby town Phatika. From a half-way to the town, we returned to our village as the tremors and falling of rocks had stopped,” he said. He said that he found Zakir dead and came to know that his elder son, Shoaib, 12, studying in Class III, died under the rubble of school building. “We buried them the next day,” Muahammad Hanif said.

Another quake victim Shabbir Khan, 25, a labour, narrated his ordeal and said that all was gone in the disaster. “No relief aid was sent to our village. Even nobody turned up to provide us shrouds for our dead. We lifted injured on our shoulders and walked one-and-a-half hour to get to the nearby town Phatika, where relief workers had been providing medical aid,” he said.

The families claimed that the road network was completely destroyed and the government’s claim to have opened roads was hollow. They said that the road from their village to Muzaffarabad was still not motorable. The land had split apart at many places and rainwater would break it further making it dangerous even to walk. There are reports that some people fell into thousands of feet deep ditch created due to the quake when the land had split.

Besides, they said that living in tents in the freezing cold is impossible. One cannot think of living in the season of hard winter without lighting up firewood in his or her house and firewood could not be lit up inside tents. They said that they could not brave the winter and decided to move to Karachi.

The survivors said that many families had been preparing to catch Karachi-bound buses, as they were frightened of living in the open or in tents.

Observers said that migration of people from the northern areas would gain momentum, as the winter had started and there was no sufficient facility for the quake victims to protect themselves against cold breeze. They would move to various cities, particularly Karachi, as many of their relatives or acquaintances could arrange accommodation for them.