Officials worked Tuesday to reach the hardest-hit remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, one day after a 7.5 magnitude earthquake left at least 339 people dead.
Afghani and Pakistani officials said 258 of those deaths occurred in Pakistan, while 78 have been confirmed dead in Afghanistan. The temblor was centered deep beneath the Hindu Kush mountains in a sparsely populated region of northeastern Afghanistan that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China.
Rescue crews were working to reach the villages near the epicenter, located 45 miles south of Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan province.
(MORE: Flooding Swamps Texas; Homeless Man Found Alive)
In Pakistan, the Swat Valley and areas around Dir, Malakand and Shangla towns in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were also hard-hit. Officials said 202 of the dead were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
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 more than 4,000 homes in Pakistan, officials said.
In Afghanistan, Qameruddin Sediqi, an adviser to the public health minister confirmed 78 dead and 466 wounded, based on numbers reported by hospitals across the country.
"We believe the exact numbers are much higher because not all people bring the bodies to the hospitals so there are many that are not being counted. And there are still areas we don't have access to so we are not aware of the situation there," he said.
Badakhshan Gov. Shah Waliullah Adeeb said more than 1,500 houses there were either destroyed or partially destroyed.
http://www.wunderground.com/news/earthquake-afghanistan-pakistan
No comments:
Post a Comment