By SOMINI SENGUPTA - ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sunday, Oct. 9This is on top of the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, which was the second-largest quake in recorded history. Add to that the hurricanes Katrina which hit New Orleans, Rita which hit western Louisiana and east Texas, and Stan which hit central America all in the last six weeks. This has been the worst 11 months for natural disasters that I can recall in the second half of the twentieth century and the first five years of the twenty-first. It must be some kind of record.
A powerful earthquake centered in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan on Saturday morning sent tremors across South Asia, killing more than 18,000 people, including at least 1,600 in remote northern Pakistan, among them hundreds across both sides of disputed Kashmir, and shaking houses and high-rises throughout the region.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's chief army spokesman, who announced the toll on Sunday, said at least 45,000 people had been injured, a vast majority on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. He said that "so far there are many areas which have not been reached" by the army, but that military units were expected to reach all of them by the end of the day.
The quake was centered in the far-flung villages of the North-West Frontier Province.
More than 1,600 were believed to have been killed in that province alone, the provincial police control room reported Saturday night. That toll includes an estimated 650 children who were killed in the collapse of three different schools.
Estimates of the quake's magnitude varied from 6.8 to 7.8, with the United States Geological Survey putting the number at 7.6. Its epicenter was roughly 60 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, where 20 "significant aftershocks" measuring between 5 and 6.2 magnitude were felt throughout the day on Saturday, Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of the Meteorological Department in Islamabad, said by telephone on Saturday evening. Officials warned that serious aftershocks could continue for two days.
The earthquake, which sent tremors as far east as New Delhi, the Indian capital, and west to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was the biggest to strike the country in a century, Dr. Chaudhry said.
The top police official of the North-West Frontier Province, Riffat Pasha, said Saturday evening that the death toll there continued to rise and that relief efforts had been stymied by blocked roads and broken communication channels.
Did we humans just hit a stretch of bad luck? It this just a random set of events that are all bad and all close together in time, or is there some underlying cause?
I don't believe in coincidence, but I can't see any common cause.
Whatever, let's hope it is over. A lot of people are dead and injured all around the world.
