NATO Continues To Expand Earthquake Relief Effort in Pakistan
14 November 2005
U.S. official to discuss emergency mission in November 16 webchat
Washington -- Racing to beat the approach of winter, NATO teams are using helicopters, wheeled vehicles and foot patrols to scour Pakistan’s earthquake-devastated mountains to find and treat hundreds of injured and sick each day, alliance officials say.
In a live Internet chat November 16, John M. Koenig, deputy chief of the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium, plans to discuss U.S. participation in the massive multinational relief mission.
The United States has deployed more than 1,000 military personnel as part of a larger international force that rushed to Pakistan following the 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8 that has killed at least 73,000 people, most of them in Pakistani Kashmir.
The U.S. military has sent 24 helicopters to Pakistan to help rescue victims from isolated mountain villages, many of them cut off from the outside world by landslides and worsening weather. More than 140 U.S. military and civilian cargo airlift flights have delivered more than 2,000 tons of medical supplies, food, shelter material, blankets, and rescue equipment, according to a State Department fact sheet.
U.S. helicopters have flown about 2,000 missions delivering almost 2,000 tons of relief supplies to the disaster area while transporting 13,000 people, including more than 4,100 people needing medical attention.
A 125-person Naval Mobile Construction Battalion is working to clear roads and debris and to build schools and other structures at camps for displaced persons. A U.S. Army Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) is operating in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, providing urgent medical care to those injured by the earthquake, and has provided urgent medical care to more than 1,200 people injured by the earthquake. Another 200-member medical team is staging in Chaklala Air Base for deployment near Balakot by November 22.
Six U.S. military ships have delivered 115 pieces of heavy equipment and 158 tons of humanitarian assistance supplies through the port of Karachi, Pakistan.
“NATO continued expanding its relief efforts today in the air and on the ground as NATO helicopters evacuated hundreds of earthquake victims from remote villages,” the military alliance said in a news release November 13.
“NATO medics treated hundreds of patients while continuing to expand their hospital facility,” the NATO release said. “And NATO engineers worked with the Pakistani Army to build winterized shelters.”
Conditions in the rugged countryside remain dangerous. On November 14, a bus carrying 19 people fell 20 meters into a ravine near NATO’s engineering camp in Arja, killing 11 people. NATO personnel brought three ambulances to the crash site and evacuated the survivors to a medical facility operated by Spanish personnel, according to a NATO press release.
Meanwhile, NATO and U.S. helicopters continue to provide a lifeline to isolated villages. “We have our helicopters flying as often as possible,” Air Commodore Andrew Walton, of the United Kingdom, said November 13. “We’re pushing hard to generate flights because time is short to bring these supplies quickly to remote areas before the snow sets in.”
Approaching snow is expected to make mountain roads impassable. “We've been talking to Pakistani authorities about using donkeys to get medicines and doctors out into the mountains,” Dutch Captain Jelle Bijlsma, operations officer for a multinational NATO medical unit, said November 9.
“There’s still much work to be done,” U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Michael LeFever, commander of the U.S. Disaster Assistance Center in Islamabad, Pakistan, told Pentagon reporters November 10. “And it'll take the entire international community, working with the Pakistanis, to get through this terrible disaster.”
LeFever said a visit to the region the week of November 14 by Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, would help draw attention to the plight of the more then 3 million people affected by the earthquake. Hughes is being accompanied by a group of U.S. corporate leaders seeking to get the American business community more involved in providing disaster relief.
“If the U.S. responds favorably,” LeFever said, “I think the rest of the world will respond favorably as well with providing aid for the devastation that they'll
surely see when they come in the country.” (See related article.)
John Koenig’s November 16 Internet chat is scheduled for 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT). A career member of the U.S. Foreign Service since 1984, Koenig is currently the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels. His biography is available on the U.S. Mission to NATO Web site.
To participate in the webchat, please register at iipchat@state.gov. If you already have participated in a previous chat, there is no need to register again. Just use the same name and password. You may identify yourself by the user name of your choice. As always, your questions and comments are welcome in advance of the program and at any time during it.
For additional information on the earthquake and its aftermath, see U.S. Response to Earthquake in South Asia.
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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