The engineering battalion promised by Nato to help reach thousands of quake survivors in the rugged hills of northern Pakistan cannot arrive soon enough, an international aid official said today.
"At the moment, the emphasis is on the need for road engineers. If we can open the roads, that would solve everything," World Food Programme spokeswoman Mia Turner said.
"We're thinking more than 2,000 villages have to be reached and they have to be reached by roads," she said two weeks after the shattering earthquake killed more than 50,000 people, left millions homeless and wrecked the few roads which wound high into the hills.
"If these people were connected, we wouldn't be carrying stuff up and down mountains on mules," she said as another train of the rented animals set off up into the hills from a village above the destroyed Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad.
Britain sent the first of three giant helicopters to the area today to help in the relief effort. Defence Secretary John Reid said the Chinook helicopters will be used to fly aid to survivors of the earthquake who are cut off because of landslides in the mountainous terrain.
UN co-ordinator Jan Vandermoortele said. "We need helicopters, a lot of helicopters and all types of helicopters."
The death toll is expected to rise substantially, with unknown numbers of people laying buried in the rubble of cut off villages. More than 74,000 people are known to have been injured and opening the roads would also allow the many, many more in cut-off villages to get medical treatment without which they face death.