A rush of earthquake survivors is expected in Islamabad as the weather worsens in Kashmir and shattered roads re-open, a senior official said today.
Islamabad district government is rushing to set up two temporary camps in addition to the three it has thrown together already and the nearby city of Rawalpindi has established three or four.
No one knows how long the survivors will have to stay after their towns and villages were destroyed by last weekend's earthquake which brought down entire hillsides, uprooted roads or buried them in landslides. Or what they will do next.
"These are very tough people. They are mountain folk and they survived problems with India," said Shezwan Mohammad Shamshad, a senior official of the Islamabad municipal government.
"But definitely they are shocked. They instantly lost everything. They are blank. They have no idea what to do next."
At the Pakistani Institute of Medical Sciences, 300 people were living in tents made for a few people. In some, up to 17 people sheltered from the rain and hail which turned the hospital grounds into a mud bath. They share four toilets and showers.
Meanwhile relief flights were severely disrupted by heavy rains which has heaped more misery on survivors as the more than one million made homeless spent another night exposed to the elements with only makeshift tents as shelter.
Operations manager of the UN relief effort, Robert Holden, said the rains made a bad situation much worse. "Many people are out without shelter. It was miserable to start with but with this things are only going to get worse," he said.
"We've also got the danger of further collapse of buildings; a very, very difficult situation made even worse by the rain."
Government officials yesterday raised the official death toll on the Pakistani side of the earthquake by 13,000 to 38,000 dead. Another 1,300 people died on the Indian side of the border. The new death toll put the disaster on a par with a quake that almost destroyed the Pakistani city of Quetta in 1935.
A Pakistan army helicopter crashed in Pakistani Kashmir during a relief operation, killing all six soldiers on board, a military spokesman said today.
"The Mi-17 helicopter crashed during daytime sometime yesterday, when it went to provide relief items in some inaccessible areas in the Bagh valley," military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said.