World

Quake Aid: Race Against The Clock

October 13, 2005 / 2:13 PM EDT / CBS/AP

With snow falling on parts of Kashmir, the U.N.'s emergency relief chief said Thursday that time was running out for many hungry, homeless survivors of a massive earthquake and urged aid agencies to speed up efforts in remote villages.

The plea came hours after an aftershock jolted parts of Pakistan, panicking people who had survived last weekend's devastating temblor and forcing a rescue team to suspend efforts to save a trapped woman. She died before the rescuers returned to the precarious rubble.

U.N. Undersecretary General and Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland flew by helicopter to the hard-hit Kashmiri city of Muzaffarabad, where he said there was an urgent need to get food, medicine, shelter and blankets to millions of people.

The U.N. estimates 2 million people are homeless ahead of the fierce winter in the Himalayan region.

CBS News correspondent Richard Roth reports for The Early Show that roads are just beginning to open and the first aid is coming into small villages in the Hindu Mountains, near the epicenter of the earthquake. Trucks with aid from dozens of countries choked the roads up to the crumbling towns of Kashmir, but access to some areas remained blocked because of landslides.

And because 10 to 15 aftershocks are hitting the region every day, people who are able to live in their homes simply don't want to.

"I fear we are losing the race against the clock in the small villages" cut off by blocked roads, Egeland said. "I've never seen such devastation before. We are in the sixth day of operation, and every day the scale of devastation is getting wider."

Thursday's 5.6-magnitude aftershock was centered 85 miles north of Islamabad, near the epicenter of Saturday's 7.6-magnitude quake that demolished whole towns, mostly in the Himalayan region of Kashmir. The quake Thursday shook buildings.

However, there is little significant damage in an already demolished region, CBS News correspondent Susan Roberts

reports for CBSNews.com

"There was a lot of panic. People were scared. Even those who were sleeping in tents came out. Everybody was crying," said Nisar Abbasi, 36, an accountant camping on the lawn of his destroyed home in Muzaffarabad, a badly hit city in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

A 22-year-old woman trapped in the rubble in Muzaffarabad died Thursday after the aftershock disrupted efforts to rescue her, rescuers and witnesses said.

British, German and Turkish teams had worked until 2 a.m., trying to extract the woman after a sniffer dog detected her in the debris. But they were forced to suspend their efforts for their own safety when the aftershock shifted the building in which they were working.

When the rescuers returned after daybreak, the sniffer dog whined, indicating that it had detected the smell of a corpse. Some rescue workers wept.

"It was a very difficult decision to leave a living person and I had a responsibility to my team. It could have meant their death," said Steff Hopkins, a British team leader.

There have been dozens of aftershocks since the main quake, including a 6.2-magnitude temblor.

"They will go on for months, possibly years," said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center.

In related developments:

U.S. helicopters flew 53 sorties to the affected region on Wednesday, transporting more than 1,000 people — rescue workers in, and injured Pakistanis out, said Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, spokesman for the U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan, where the helicopters are based. They also brought in 123,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, he said.

The U.S. aid is already making a difference: many of the supplies were loaded aboard eight U.S. Chinook helicopters to be brought into the disaster zone. One American soldier in Islamabad told CBS News correspondent Robert Berger he had come from hurricane relief duty in New Orleans. And the United States has promised to bring in more helicopters. Also flying supplies into the region were helicopters from Germany and Afghanistan. Some 50,000 Pakistani troops joined the relief effort. The Pentagon expects to send 25 to 30 more U.S. military helicopters to Pakistan from Afghanistan, Bahrain and other countries in the region.

The death toll was believed to be more than 35,000, and tens of thousands were injured. "No country is ready for such a disaster," President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Wednesday. He acknowledged initial delays in his government's response but said the relief operation was now in full swing.

A Pakistani doctor who once treated Osama bin Laden is among hundreds of volunteers from an Islamic group who are participating in relief work in quake-hit areas of northwest Pakistan and Kashmir. "We have sent 50 trucks carrying relief goods to Kashmir and those areas of northwestern Pakistan where the quake killed thousands of people," said Yahya Mujahid, spokesman for Jamat-e-Dawad group, which describes itself as a charity.

German, Afghan, Pakistani and U.S. helicopters delivered tents, blankets and medical equipment, and brought back dozens of badly injured people on each return flight.

About a dozen men worked through the night in Islamabad looking for survivors from a 10-story apartment building that collapsed in the quake, the only serious damage in Pakistan's capital.

On Thursday morning, they pulled out two bodies and covered them in burial shrouds. A total of 40 bodies have been recovered from the building.

Most disturbingly, perhaps, is the statistic that about half of the country's victims are below the age of 15 and nearly a third are under the age of nine, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports for The Early Show. And, as both rescues and aftershocks continue, the few voices of children heard trapped under the rubble are growing more silent every day, Cowan reports.

But every once in a while there's a sound and a face.

Wednesday, a team of French rescuers saw a boy using a tiny camera they snaked into the rubble. The boy was 15 down, still trapped. So as to not cause another collapse, the rescue team dug out only an escape hatch for the boy, and by nightfall he was out, in safe hands.

"No one is giving up but it is the acceptance that the actual real chances of finding someone alive are almost nil, so we don't need all the specialist international teams," Holden said, adding that there are still 18 international teams in the region.

A Russian team in Muzaffarabad on Wednesday rescued a 5-year-old girl who had been trapped for nearly 100 hours in the rubble. Injured classmates come to watch the recovery efforts.

Their parents come to pray, but there is now an eerie quiet (video)

Trucks and helicopters with aid from dozens of countries choked the roads up to the crumbling towns of Kashmir, but the hungry and the homeless in many hard-hit areas were still in desperate straits five days after the temblor struck.