Survivors built makeshift shelters with sticks and bedsheets after their mud houses were destroyed in an earthquake that killed 348 people in south-western Pakistan and pushed up a new island from the Arabian Sea.
While waiting for help to reach remote villages, hungry people dug through the rubble to find food and the country’s poorest province struggled with a dearth of medical supplies, hospitals and other aid.
Tuesday’s quake flattened wide swathes of Awaran district, where it was centred, leaving much of the population homeless.
Almost all of the 300 mud-brick homes in the village of Dalbadi were destroyed.
A spokesman for the Baluchistan provincial government, Jan Mohammad Bulaidi, said today that the death toll had climbed to 348 and that another 552 people had been injured.
Doctors in the village treated some of the injured, but due to a scarcity of medicine and staff, they were mostly seen comforting residents.
The remoteness of the area and the lack of infrastructure hampered relief efforts. Awaran district is one of the poorest in the country’s most impoverished province.
Just getting to victims was challenging in a region with almost no roads where many people use four-wheel-drive vehicles and camels to traverse the rough terrain.
“We need more tents, more medicine and more food,” said Mr Bulaidi.
Houses in the village of Kaich, made mostly of mud and hand-made bricks, had collapsed. Walls and roofs caved in, and people’s possessions were scattered on the ground. A few goats roamed through the ruins.
The Pakistani military said it had sent almost 1,000 troops to the area overnight and was sending helicopters as well. A convoy of 60 army trucks left the port city of Karachi yesterday with supplies.
Pakistani forces have evacuated more than 170 people from various villages around Awaran to the district hospital, the military said. Others were evacuated to Karachi.
One survivor interviewed in his Karachi hospital bed said he was sleeping when the quake struck.
“I don’t know who brought me from Awaran to here in Karachi, but I feel back pain and severe pain in my whole body,” he said.
Local officials said they were sending doctors, food and 1,000 tents for people who had nowhere to sleep. The efforts were complicated by strong aftershocks.
Baluchistan is Pakistan’s largest province but also the least populated. Medical facilities are few and often poorly stocked with supplies and qualified personnel. Awaran district has about 300,000 people spread out over 11,197 square miles.
The local economy consists mostly of smuggling fuel from Iran or harvesting dates.
The area where the quake struck is at the centre of an uprising that Baluch separatists have been waging against the Pakistani government for years. The separatists regularly attack Pakistani troops and symbols of the state, such as infrastructure projects.
It’s also prone to earthquakes. A magnitude 7.8 quake centred just across the border in Iran killed at least 35 people in Pakistan last April.
Tuesday’s shaking was so violent it drove up mud and earth from the seabed to create an island off the Pakistani coast.
Pakistani Navy geologist Mohammed Danish told the country’s Geo Television that the mass was a little wider than a tennis court and slightly shorter than a football field.