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World not doing enoughPosted on Friday, October 21 @ 10:01:13 CDT by El-Diablo
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan — The top UN relief co-ordinator warned Thursday that bold initiatives are needed to save as many as three million people left homeless by the South Asian earthquake as winter approaches in the Himalayas.
The World Health Organization, meanwhile, reported three quake survivors died of tetanus, reinforcing fears that disease and infected injuries could drive the 79,000 death toll far higher.
Jan Egeland, the UN relief co-ordinator, appealed to NATO and other potential donors to step in with an army of helicopters to fly in relief supplies and evacuate perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.
“The world is not doing enough,” Egeland said in Geneva.
“We should be able to do this.”
He called for “a second Berlin air bridge,” or non-stop flights reminiscent of the U.S. and British airlift of essential supplies into West Berlin in the late 1940s when Soviet troops blocked the city’s road links to the West for nearly 11 months.
At one point, cargo planes landed in West Berlin at the rate of one per minute.
“We thought that the tsunami was as bad as it could get. This is worse,” Egeland said.
“The race against the clock is also like no other one. There is a terrible cut-off for us in the beginning of December, maybe even before, when there will be massive snowfalls in the Himalayan mountains.”
NATO was expected to approve on Friday the dispatch of medics and hundreds of military engineers to clear roads and help reconstruction. Some 220 members of Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, are already in the quake area.
However, allied commanders said it would be hard to muster enough of the light helicopters needed for flying in remote mountain areas to mount the campaign envisioned by Egeland.
Helicopters loaded with food and other supplies and soldiers on foot fanned out from the shattered city of Muzaffarabad in the heart of the earthquake zone in a frantic attempt to get help to remote villages damaged in the Oct. 8 tremor.
“There is a continued need for more helicopter capacity, to move in the inaccessible areas,” said Hilary Benn, British secretary of state for international development. “The terrain here is very difficult and winter is approaching.”
The first of 20 additional U.S. military helicopters will arrive next week to help. The choppers shipped from the U.S. Air National Guard are being reassembled in Afghanistan, he said.
A dozen U.S. military helicopters are ferrying in supplies and evacuating people from remote areas in Pakistan. Five more helicopters, normally used by the U.S. State Department for drug surveillance, will also be used.
Dozens of Pakistani and other foreign helicopters also are flying missions to aid survivors in isolated villages.
Abdul Aziz, whose wife was killed in the magnitude-7.6 quake, decided it was better to seek help rather than wait. He walked seven hours to Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir, with his three sons and daughter. The girl had a broken bone and all suffered from exposure and malnutrition.
Posted October 21st 2005, The Chronicle Herald
Note: If you wish to donate to the relief effort please contact your local Red Cross or OxFam Canada
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