Pakistan Quake Zone Escapes Dreaded 2nd Wave of Deaths

Mild Weather, Timely Aid Make Difference

DANA DAMAN JHOL, Pakistan -- In the first days after the Oct. 8 earthquake, things looked bleak for Sher Zaman's family. They had no food, no shelter -- not even blankets. Those, along with the rest of their meager possessions, had been buried in the rubble of their home, high on a Kashmiri mountainside that the family expected would soon be covered with snow.

But Zaman had no intention of hiking down to a relief camp and abandoning his only remaining wealth, a patch of land and two cows. So he decided to stay. Now, more than four months later, that choice appears to have been vindicated.

Helped by uncommonly mild weather, timely outside aid and a resourcefulness bred of harsh mountain living, Zaman, his wife and four children have been able to put the worst of the catastrophe behind them. Amply supplied with food and medicine, they live in a temporary shelter made from wood scraps and corrugated steel.

"Allah has been kind," said Zaman, a thin, weather-beaten farmer and retired soldier who says he is about 50 but looks a decade older. "Since our home wasn't intact, Allah realized this and saved us from a severe winter."

The family's experience sheds light on a welcome and somewhat unexpected twist to the aftermath of the earthquake, the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history, which killed at least 73,000 people and left an estimated 2.8 million homeless across Pakistani Kashmir and parts of northern Pakistan. An additional 1,300 people died in the part of Kashmir held by India.

Despite dire warnings last fall, a widely anticipated second wave of deaths from disease, hunger and exposure has not materialized, according to foreign and Pakistani aid officials. As a result, aid workers are starting to shift their attention from emergency relief to the long-term challenge of reconstruction across a remote mountainous region roughly the size of Belgium.

Besides the good weather, which has enabled helicopters to keep shuttling supplies through the winter, the aid effort owes its success to foreign donors, including the United States, and a surprisingly smooth working relationship between aid groups and the Pakistani army, which has taken the lead in relief operations after a stumbling start.

"I think most of the humanitarian actors on the ground think we're going to make it," said Jan Vandemoortele, the U.N. coordinator for earthquake relief in Pakistan. "We were fearing a second wave of deaths. It didn't occur."

Winter is not over in the Himalayas, and aid officials warn that a heavy snowfall or plunge in temperatures could still threaten survivors. Other worries include a looming shortage of funds for helicopter operations, which cost about $500,000 a day, and the potential for landslides across the unstable terrain.

But in general, the picture looks far brighter than it did in late October.

After a slow start, foreign donors by this month had contributed 68 percent of the $550 million that the United Nations requested to fund emergency relief operations for the six months after the disaster.

Because of a shortfall in the global supply of winter tents, aid agencies have scrambled to provide survivors outside relief camps with makeshift shelters built from salvaged timber, plastic tarpaulins and corrugated-metal sheets. An absence of major snowstorms has made the job much easier.