INDIA: Crucial helicopter flights carrying food, blankets and tents to tens of thousands of earthquake survivors in remote parts of northeast Pakistan resumed yesterday, after a weekend of storms and rain.
Relief officials estimate that supplies had not yet reached at least a fifth of the affected region, as roads leading to it were still blocked by landslides triggered by the October 8th quake that has claimed over 40,000 lives.
Another 1,300 were killed in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Officials in the Pakistani capital Islamabad warned that time was running out to provide shelter for over two million rendered homeless by the quake that has flattened vast areas of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Unconfirmed reports from Pakistani Kashmir's capital, Muzaffarabad, suggest that the death toll from the earthquake could touch 54,000, as the full extent of damage was not fully known.
Army bulldozers have reopened a key road into the quake-rocked Jhelum Valley, previously accessible only by helicopter.
The impending winter now threatens people left in the open with neither shelter, warm clothing, blankets, food nor medical care. Tents too were in desperately short supply.
"It is a race against time and it's a race we're not going to win unless we put a massive effort in getting goods and services here now," retired Lieut Gen Sikander Hayat Khan, Kashmir's regional prime minister, said, adding that 70,000 people had been injured.
Relief details were discovering an increasing number of people with untreated injuries, whose wounds are becoming infected and gangrenous. "We saw rows of people in a really bad way with suppurating wounds," Seán Keogh, a doctor with a British medical aid group said following a three-day trek to the Neelum Valley high up in the mountains.
Between 1,000 and 2,000 wounded people needed surgical treatment, he added. A stream of people, despairing of help reaching them and some even carrying their injured, continue to emerge from the hills.
They have overwhelmed the crowded hospitals, where an inadequate number of doctors are working around the clock.
"You can go in any direction and paint a dire picture," said Robert Holden, head of the UN relief operation. The scale seemed to be growing and the humanitarian lifeline was thin.
A conference of rich countries will be held in Geneva next week to assess Pakistan's needs for rebuilding its devastated north, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said yesterday. An assessment of the destruction was still underway, but prime minister Shaukat Aziz estimated it had caused damage of $5 billion.
So far some $500 million has been pledged.