Toll Mounts, Quake Relief Lags
Indian authorities air-dropped burial shrouds and food Monday to remote villages hit by the weekend's devastating earthquake, while Pakistan's army was flying food, water and medicine into the disaster zone. International relief efforts cranked into action, with flights carrying rescue teams and supplies arriving in Pakistan.
Most of the dead were in Pakistan's mountainous north. India reported more than 800 deaths, and Afghanistan reported four. But Pakistan's death toll estimates ranged from 20,000 to above 30,000.
The United Nations said over 2.5 million people were left homeless by Saturday's monster 7.6-magnitude quake, and doctors warned of an outbreak of disease unless more relief arrives soon.
Landslides blocked roads to many of the worst-hit areas. Everywhere along the earthquake's trail of destruction now, time has become the crucial factor for survival of people still trapped, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth. But the landscape does not help their odds.
Shovels and picks and desperate bare hands were struggling to free more than 800 children buried in the collapse of two schools in the town of Balakot. Small voices called "save me" from beneath the rubble — to parents that could hear but could not help.
Shopkeepers in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan's portion of divided Kashmir, clashed with looters Monday and hungry families huddled under tents while waiting for relief supplies after the earthquake razed entire villages and buried roads in rubble.
"Perhaps the disaster, the magnitude of the disaster is too big. It is something that Pakistan was clearly not prepared for," reporter Fahd Husain in Islamabad told CBS Radio News. "The damage and destruction has been so extensive that even after almost 3 days, there are many places where no relief operations, no relief goods have even reached them."
Villagers complained that food and water supplies were gone and some of them organized their own expeditions for supplies.
Some residents were forced to organize their own relief efforts.
"It has been three days and nothing is at our village," said Buniyar villager Mohammed Zafra, who hired a car to get supplies a nearby town.
"We have no water. We are running out of food," Zafra said as he tried to fend off angry villagers who mistook him and his car — now piled high with blankets, food and cooking supplies — for an aid supply.
He said authorities had delivered rice, flour and sugar. Part of it was air dropped by military aircraft over remote villages. In addition, shrouds — pieces of unstitched cloth required by Islam for burial — also had been air-dropped, he said.
"Nothing has come to us, nothing!" shouted one woman, a blue veil covering her hair, as she banged on the hood of his car before being pushed away by two policemen.
Nearby, irate residents blocked roads for the second day to protest the tardy assistance. An off-duty policeman commandeered a car full of journalists to bring them to see the plight of his village of Pringal Uri.
"No one has come to our village to find out what has happened to us, to tell us how the damage to our houses will be fixed," said the policeman, Mushdaq Youssuf, 29. "We have no money to fix the houses."
About 2,000 people huddled around camp fires through the cold night on a soccer field on the city's university campus, where most buildings had collapsed and hundreds were feared buried in classrooms and dormitories. Soldiers burrowed into the concrete with shovels and iron bars.
"I don't think anybody is alive in this pile of rubble," rescue worker Uzair Khan said. "But we have not lost hope."
On the soccer field, Mohammed Ullah Khan, 50, said a few biscuits handed out by relief workers were his only food for three days. His wife, who suffered a fractured leg, was wrapped in a yellow quilt beside him.
Their three-story home had collapsed in the quake. His family of 10 people survived because they were on the top floor, which crashed to the ground.
"My children are now on a hillside, under the open sky, with nothing to eat," he said.
A doctor, Iqbal Khan, said there was a serious risk of outbreaks of diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia if drinking water and other relief supplies do not arrive quickly.
"These people feel as if there is no one to take care of them," he said.
The city had no electricity, and people collected water from a mountain stream.
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said the earthquake was the country's worst on record and appealed for urgent help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas.
India, a longtime rival of Pakistan, offered help in a gesture of cooperation. The nuclear-armed neighbors have been pursuing peace after fighting three wars since independence from British rule in 1947, two of them over the Kashmir region.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said his country's death toll was 19,396 and was expected to rise.
Senior officials in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir put the death toll much higher. The top elected official in the region, Sardar Sikandar Hayat, said that more than 25,000 people had died there with "countless" injured. Tariq Mahmood, the province's communications minister, put the toll at over 30,000.
The quake was felt across a wide swath of South Asia, with damage spanning at least 250 miles from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory.
Pakistan on Monday thanked the international community for sending rescue teams and relief goods to help survivors of a 7.6-magnitude quake that killed thousands.
"We are overwhelmed by the international community's response to our appeal for the help for Saturday's quake victims," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said at a news conference.
Many countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Germany and Russia, have sent experts, food, medicines and other relief supplies to Pakistan.
By Monday, at least two American planes with relief supplies had arrived at Islamabad. U.S. forces in Afghanistan sent five Chinook transport helicopters and three Blackhawk helicopters to Pakistan.