Balakot, Pakistan – Pakistani officials predicted Sunday that many more thousands of dead would be found in earthquake-ravaged Kashmir as heavy rains in the Himalayan region drenched homeless survivors in mud and misery.
The latest estimate would raise the death toll from the magnitude-7.6 quake in the mountains of northern Pakistan and India to at least 54,000 – a jump of more than 13,000 from the official count of known dead.
The surviving victims along the border of India and Pakistan in Kashmir are still in shock from the disaster and from the oncoming Himalayan winter, now expressed in cold and rain.
So great was the earth’s fury Oct. 8, Hakim Ali Khan said, pointing up above the Indian village of Kamal Kote, even the mountains cracked.
Three waterfalls were created. Massive boulders were dislodged from the Himalayas, sending cattle to their deaths in the ravines. Every house crumbled, leaving a death toll of at least 300 and an immeasurable grief.
No strangers to loss, the people in Kamal Kote, a cluster of villages pressed against the disputed Kashmir frontier, have survived three wars in the last half-century. They were shelled from across the cease-fire line, when the two countries nearly went to war a fourth time, in late 2001.
Kamal Kote’s men were hounded, beaten, killed by Indian soldiers fighting a guerrilla war that began in the late 1980s, and in droves, they crossed over into Muzafarrabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The line divided Kashmiri families for 50 years.
Through a pitiless fluke of nature, the earthquake rumbled practically under that line. The jaljalla, as people here call it, crushed everything on either side. It ushered in a despair that even Kashmiris have not known.
“The three wars, they were over land,” said Khan, who is old enough to remember them all. “This jaljalla was God’s work.”
He called it “a divine catastrophe.”
Kashmiris on this side have only hints about the destruction just across the ridge.
When the quake hit Muzaffarabad, Irshad Ahmed Bucch saw his family sundered. His wife died. His daughter lived, but the shock made her mute, and in the last week, she had not shed a single tear.
A spokesman for the prime minister of the Pakistani side of the region warned that the cold and wet could cause further deaths among the 2 million or so people believed to be homeless.
About a fifth of the villages in the quake zone remained cut off eight days after the quake turned villages scattered across lush mountainsides into death traps, and the bad weather over Kashmir halted aid flights by helicopters.
Government officials in Islamabad said early Sunday that 39,422 people were confirmed killed in all of Pakistan – at least 26,422 dead in the Pakistani portion of Kashmir and another 13,000 in North West Frontier Province.
Later Sunday, a spokesman for the state government chief in the Pakistani portion of Kashmir said the death toll in that region alone is believed to be “not less than 40,000.” This would mean the quake killed more than 53,000 in all of Pakistan.
With another 1,350 deaths reported in India’s part of Kashmir, that brings the quake’s death toll to more than 54,000.
A precise death toll will be difficult to determine, because many bodies are buried under collapsed buildings and landslides.
“The United Nations is still operating on the government’s official numbers,” said Andrew MacLeod, humanitarian-affairs officer with the U.N. Coordination and Assessment Team. “There are regions that still have not been reached, and the death toll is not final.”
Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmed Khan, the Pakistani relief commissioner, voiced fears about the chilly downpours that were making conditions even more miserable for quake survivors forced to live in the open.
He said 29,000 tents and 118,000 blankets had been distributed in the quake zone, but he estimated that 100,000 tents were needed.
The army said medical supplies such as syringes, painkillers and antibiotics also were scarce.
Torrential rain halted airborne relief efforts in Kashmir, where the Pakistani military said a relief helicopter crashed in bad weather late Saturday, killing all six soldiers aboard.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
