Pakistan Quake Recovery Seen As Success

The dusk sky darkens to red as injured earthquake survivors sit on beds and stretchers waiting for a helicopter to arrive and evacuate them from a river bank in Balakot, Pakistan in this October 13, 2005 file photo. Two years after the earthquake that killed 80,000 people in the mountains of northern Pakistan, survivors struggle with landslides and sky-high prices as they rebuild but virtually all will have adequate shelter this winter. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File) (David Guttenfelder - AP)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Two years after the earthquake that killed 80,000 people in the mountains of northern Pakistan, survivors struggle with landslides and sky-high prices to rebuild, but virtually all will have adequate shelter this winter.

The mammoth effort to reconstruct homes and amenities for 3.5 million people has been lauded by international donors as a model response to a massive natural disaster.

Some 210,000 quake-resistant homes have been rebuilt and another 350,000 are under construction across the rugged terrain of Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, now dotted with new corrugated iron roofs and other signs of building activity.

There have been setbacks. Monsoon rains slowed work and some international aid groups were briefly evacuated this summer when tribesmen in the quake zone destroyed their offices to display their anger over the deadly Pakistan army raid on Islamabad's Red Mosque.

But now only 6,000 quake victims are left sheltering in tents, easing once dire fears of a humanitarian crisis in the harsh Himalayan winter that usually sets in by December.

"There will be no problem whatsoever this winter. The whole area has changed," said Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmed, deputy chairman of Pakistan's Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority. He hoped that most houses would be finished by year's end.

The magnitude 7.6 quake struck on the morning of Oct. 8, 2005, crushing residents in their mud-and-stone rural homes and thousands of children inside poorly built schools.

A vast international relief effort, backed by Pakistan's army, staved off more deaths in the months that followed.

The challenges of the $4.3 billion campaign to rebuild were, and remain, enormous: to construct 6,500 schools, 800 clinics and hospitals and repair 4,000 miles of roads; to cater for thousands of orphans, widows and hundreds of amputees and others disabled by their injuries.

Ahmed said donors have made good on their funding commitments and Pakistan is in a position to rebuild back better, although for now, many schools and clinics are in prefabricated structures. He predicted that most reconstruction would be complete within three years.

He said the two worst-hit towns, Muzaffarabad and Balakot, were being relocated.

Survivors, recovering slowly from a disaster in which virtually everone lost at least one family member, are more pessimistic.