PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Rescuers were struggling to reach quake-stricken regions in Pakistan and Afghanistan on Tuesday as officials said the combined death toll from the previous day’s earthquake rose to 311. ADVERTISING PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Rescuers were struggling to reach
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Rescuers were struggling to reach quake-stricken regions in Pakistan and Afghanistan on Tuesday as officials said the combined death toll from the previous day’s earthquake rose to 311.
According to Afghan and Pakistani officials, 237 people died in Pakistan and 74 in Afghanistan in the magnitude-7.5 quake, which was centered deep beneath the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan’s sparsely populated Badakhshan province that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China.
Afghan authorities were scrambling to access the hardest-hit areas near the epicenter, located 45 miles south of Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan province.
In Pakistan, the Swat Valley and areas around the Dir, Malakand and Shangla towns in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were also hard-hit in the quake. The Pakistani town closest to the epicenter is Chitral while on the Afghan side it is the Jurm district of Badakhshan.
More than 2,000 people were injured in Monday’s temblor, which also damaged nearly 2,500 homes in Pakistan, officials said.
In Afghanistan, Ismail Kawusi, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry said the numbers gathered so far from hospitals in various provinces recorded 457 injured. Earlier, Wais Ahmad Barmak, the Afghan minister for disaster management, said 74 people were dead and 266 had been injured.
Badakhshan’s Governor Shah Waliullah Adeeb said that in all, 13 districts in the province had been affected, with more than 1,500 houses either destroyed or partially destroyed.
In his province alone, casualty figures of 11 dead and 25 injured “will rise by the end of the day, once the survey teams get to the remote areas and villages,” Adeeb said.
Helicopters were needed to reach the most remote villages, many inaccessible by road at the best of times, he added. Now, landslides and falling rocks have blocked the few existing roads. Food and other essentials were ready to go, he said, but “getting there is not easy.”
Badakhshan is one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, despite vast mineral deposits. It is often hit by earthquakes, but casualty figures are usually low because it is so sparsely populated, with fewer than 1 million people spread across its vast mountains and valleys. It also suffers from floods, snowstorms and mudslides.
The casualties and the extent of damage were still being assessed, said Ahmad Kamal, the spokesman for Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority. Bajur tribal region bordering Afghanistan was also affected by the quake, with dozens of homes damaged in other tribal regions.
