Quake Aid Rolls In As Hopes Fade

Countries have pledged some $165 million to aid the victims of the South Asia earthquake, the United Nations said Thursday as shipments of relief supplies to the devastated region picked up speed.

Reporting from Jabori, Pakistan, CBS News correspondent Richard Roth says the relief operation is just beginning to break through. The mountains are not dotted just with villages, but whole communities that have been cut off and that are still stranded.

Rescue efforts have given way to aid relief, as hopes fade of finding more survivors five days after the earthquake. Nevertheless, emergency supplies have yet to reach remote regions of the most devastated area in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

People in Jabori have

The U.S. military in Afghanistan started loading cargo planes to drop aid by parachute to devastated areas in neighboring Pakistan. They will drop beans, rice, tarpaulins, tea, oil, salt, tools, hygiene products, blankets, sugar, shoes, stoves and coal. Bagram, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan, will become a staging post for airdrops.

"We are in a hurry; we should all be in a hurry to rush assistance to victims," said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "They should not be allowed to go through yet another traumatic experience."

One aid worker says conditions are going from "bad to worse" for earthquake survivors in Pakistan.

The health adviser to a group that brought water, juice and milk to some villages in North West Frontier Province says everything smells awful. He says people are hungry, homeless and panicking. Also, no one has been able to dig out a school that collapsed with children inside.

Another aid group says its workers tried to reach remote mountainous areas, but had to get out of their truck and walk in one area because of bad roads and traffic jams.

The top UN relief official says he's never seen such devastation before, and that every day, it seems worse. He says millions of people urgently need food, medicine, blankets and shelter. But small villages remain cut off by blocked roads, and it's already snowing in parts of the region.

With more than 35,000 deaths reported, mass burials are under way.

Stevens said the $165 million is the amount pledged to the disaster relief effort generally, not specifically committed to a U.N. appeal that was made earlier this week. The figure includes direct pledges to the affected countries, she said.

On Tuesday, the United Nations appealed to the international community for $272 million to provide emergency supplies such as tents, medical aid and helicopters for six months.

Stevens said the responses from donors at a meeting in Geneva on Thursday were "very positive." Nevertheless, she cautioned that the U.N. never received the full amount pledged to it.

However, aid workers and residents of the region are worried the further damage could occur. Thursday, an aftershock hindered the rescue effort for hours.

The 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

"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.

Stevens said she will provide a better picture of the pledges and how many are specifically committed to the U.N. effort on Friday.

The U.S. said it was committing at least $10 million of its initial $50 million pledge to the U.N.

Besides the rush to get food, medicine, shelter and blankets to millions of people, Stevens pointed to a "desperate need" for helicopters to transport the goods to the victims and bring back severely wounded who cannot wait for medical facilities to be set up.

Stevens said aid agencies needed 90 helicopters for the relief effort, about three times as many as currently deployed.

The U.N. estimates some 4 million people were affected by the earthquake, including 2 million who lost homes ahead of the fierce winter. It has also warned that measles and other diseases could break out.

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.

So far, some 30 nations have contributed relief supplies and manpower.