QUAKE CREATES ISLAND
Alongside the carnage of Pakistan’s massive earthquake came the creation of a small island of mud, stone and bubbling gas that pushed forth from the seabed.
Experts say the island was formed by the massive movement of the earth during the 7.7-magnitude quake that hit Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
The island appeared off the coast of Gwadar, a port about 330 miles from Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi and 75 miles from Iran.
Navy geologist Mohammed Danish told Pakistan’s Geo Television that a Pakistani navy team visited the island Wednesday. He said the mass was about 60 feet high, 100 feet wide and 250 feet long, making it a little wider than a tennis court and slightly shorter than a football field.
Such land masses have appeared before off Pakistan’s Makran coast, said Muhammed Arshad, a hydrographer with the navy. After quakes in 1999 and 2010, new land masses rose along a different part of the coast about 175 miles east of Gwadar, he said.
Each of those disappeared back into the sea within a year, during the stormy monsoon season that sweeps Pakistan every summer, he said.
— Associated Press
Survivors built makeshift shelters with sticks and bedsheets Wednesday, a day after their mud houses were flattened in an earthquake that killed 285 people in southwestern Pakistan.
While waiting for help to reach remote villages, hungry people dug through the rubble to find food. And the country’s poorest province struggled with a dearth of medical supplies, hospitals and other aid.
The quake flattened wide swathes of Awaran district, where it was centered, leaving much of the population homeless.
Almost all of the 300 mud-brick homes in the village of Dalbadi were destroyed. Noor Ahmad said he was working when the quake struck and rushed home to find his house leveled and his wife and son dead.
“I’m broken,” he said. “I have lost my family.”
At least 373 people were injured, according to a statement from the National Disaster Management Authority, which gave the latest death toll.
Doctors in the village treated some of the injured, but were mostly seen comforting residents because of a scarcity of medicine and staff.
The remoteness of the area and the lack of infrastructure hampered relief efforts. Awaran district is one of the poorest in the country’s most impoverished province of Baluchistan.
Just getting to victims was challenging in a region with almost no roads and where many people use four-wheel-drive vehicles and camels to traverse the rough terrain.
“We need more tents, more medicine and more food,” said Jan Mohammad Bulaidi, a spokesman for the provincial government.
Images from the village of Kaich showed the devastation. Houses made mostly of mud and handmade bricks had collapsed. Walls and roofs caved in, and people’s possessions were scattered on the ground. A few goats roamed through the ruins.
The Pakistani military said it had rushed almost 1,000 troops to the area overnight and was sending helicopters. A convoy of 60 Pakistani army trucks left the port city of Karachi early Wednesday with supplies.
Pakistani forces have evacuated more than 170 people from various villages around Awaran to the district hospital, the military said. Others were evacuated to Karachi.
One survivor interviewed in his Karachi hospital bed said he was sleeping when the quake struck.
“I don’t know who brought me from Awaran to here in Karachi, but I feel back pain and severe pain in my whole body,” he said.
Jan said he didn’t know what happened to the man’s family. He was trying to contact relatives.
Local officials said they were sending doctors, food and 1,000 tents for people who had nowhere to sleep, but the efforts were complicated by strong aftershocks.
Baluchistan is Pakistan’s largest province but also the least populated. Medical facilities are few and often poorly stocked with supplies and qualified personnel. Awaran district has about 300,000 residents spread out over 11,197 square miles.
The local economy consists mostly of smuggling fuel from Iran or harvesting dates.
The area where the quake struck is at the center of an insurgency that Baluch separatists have been waging against the Pakistani government for years. The separatists regularly attack Pakistani troops and symbols of the state, such as infrastructure projects.
It’s also prone to earthquakes. A magnitude 7.8 quake centered just across the border in Iran killed at least 35 people in Pakistan last April.
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