Earthquake: Search for survivors calls off (Agencies) Updated: 2005-10-15 09:04
Rescue workers abandoned the search Friday for survivors trapped in the
rubble of last week's earthquake, though individual efforts continued, with an
18-month-old girl pulled out alive from the ruins of her home.
Pakistani rescue
workers remove a dead body from rubble of 10-story apartment building that
collapsed in the 7.6 magnitude earthquake a day earlier, Sunday, Oct. 9,
2005 in Islamabad, Pakistan. [AP] |
A top U.N. official warned that reconstruction of the devastated region will
cost billions of dollars and take up to a decade, and the United Nations
increased its appeal for quake aid to $312 million. Weather forecasters said
heavy rains expected in the quake zone this weekend could disrupt efforts to
provide food and shelter to an estimated 2 million people ahead of the harsh
Himalayan winter.
With Pakistan's death toll from the Oct. 8 earthquake estimated at more than
35,000, Jan Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary-general and emergency relief
coordinator, said the search-and-rescue phase was now over. "It's a cruel
reality. But after a week, very few people survive," he said.
Still, a doctor, Mazhar Hussain, told Pakistan's GEO television and the
British Broadcasting Corp. that his rescue team had pulled the toddler,
unconscious but alive, from under the door of her collapsed house, which had
protected her. Her mother and two brothers were found dead nearby, but her
father survived.
"Her right hand is broken and she has a fracture in her left leg," he said on
GEO, speaking from Balimang in the North-West Frontier Province, where the girl
was found.
Egeland, who traveled to hard-hit areas, said he feared bottlenecks of relief
supplies.
"If we don't work together, we will become a disaster within a disaster," he
said. He said it would take billions of dollars and "five to 10 years" to
rebuild.
With few survivors expected, the focus of the U.N. shifted to the relief
operation.
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