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PAKISTAN: Tents Not Sole Solution for Quake Victims
By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Oct 23 (IPS) - A fortnight after the devastating October 8 temblor hit the Kashmir region, the survivors are huddled down under plastic sheeting, cardboard or rocky overhangs, sheltering as best they can against a mercilessly cold and wet Himalayan winter.
The luckier ones have managed to get hold of tents, the quality of the canvas making all the difference between survival and death in the beautiful valleys and hill slopes that make up much of Pakistan administered Kashmir and the adjoining North West frontier Province (NWP)- where as many as 100,000 people may already have perished in the wake of the 7.8 Richter quake.
''Tents, tents, tents and prefab housing,'' said Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz reflecting government thinking on what can be the immediate solution to providing immediate shelter to some four million survivors.
But many point out that tents, even if available in the required numbers, are costly and had many disadvantages when compared to readily available local materials, starting with ordinary corrugated tin which is capable of withstanding high winds and is flame proof-important because fires need to be lit inside for cooking and warmth.
Tanvir Abdullah who had gone to Rehra, a small hamlet in Kashmir, to search for Hanif, his family cook, found the man sheltering with his family under a sheet of corrugated tin, the only part of his former home that was intact and reusable.
''People need water-proof tents,'' the well-to-do Tanvir Abdullah told IPS. He had carried 15 tents, each costing 115 dollars with him as a humanitarian gesture.
But he acknowledged that with temperatures plunging and an early winter expected, tents, especially those made of ordinary canvas, were just not be the answer, although quantities of them in all shapes and sizes, are piling in from local sources as well as from other countries.
The 'winterised' versions capable of allowing inmates to survive the long, cold and wet winter are expensive. ''From 150 dollars the prices have been hiked to 300 dollars and the supply is not able to keep up with the demand - and right now there is no check on the quality,'' said Jiwan Das, field specialist with the British voluntary group 'Save the Children'.
''What will be the use of tents, millions of them, if they are unable to keep the survivors warm? There has to be a solution to escape the cold other than through tents?'' asks Shabnam Abdullah, a Karachi-based event manager, who decided to donate tents instead of food and clothes.
''The canvas and tarpaulin tents are still needed, but their utility will decrease six weeks from now when it begins to snow,'' said Das. ''From this week, we will start supplying a kit consisting of a hammer, nails, pliers and a saw so that people can use the tin sheets and timber from the rubble to build temporary shelters. Tin is already being used in these areas for sloped roofs that allow snow to slide down and it also provides insulation and keep in the warmth.''
Tin sheets braced with bamboo poles came in handy in quickly rehabilitating the survivors of the October 1991 earthquake in India's Himalayan state of Uttaranchal, where climatic conditions are similar to that of Kashmir.
Official death toll figures of over 52,000 have been fiercely disputed by the Kashmiri leadership which estimates it at over 100,000. Two weeks since the catastrophe, emergency aid workers have not yet been able to reach thousands of survivors marooned in inaccessible mountainous areas.
Ironically, those who survived are now at great risk of being annihilated by disease, cold, lack of proper nutrition but most of all because they have no shelter to fend off an early winter and intermittent rain. The U.N. has warned of a new wave of deaths if relief does not reach soon. The government, citizen's organizations and philanthropy-minded individuals have supplied thousands of tents, and yet there is need for much more.
As a short-term measure the government is importing 50,000 tents from India and other countries to set up tent villages in the quake-hit areas and 16 tented sites are being set up in each district 500-700 tent clusters with each estimated to cost 1.3 million dollars.
A tent city, to provide shelter for 50,000 people is already coming up near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir where 90 percent of the buildings were flattened.
''I’ve seen such villages in Balakot and Muzaffarabad, and I’ve seen tented hospitals, but the sanitation system is a shambles,'' says Amjad Rashid of the voluntary Taraqee Foundation. He and others also point out that ''donated tents are being sold in the black markets of Rawalpindi and Islamabad''.
''If it has to be tents then people would want them near their homes as they don’t want to move away from the rubble,'' says Arif Hasan, noted architect, planner, teacher and consultant.
''I don’t think tented-communities are a good idea anyway and should be discouraged,'' says Shershah Syed, a senior doctor from Karachi who has set up a medical camp in Mansehra, in the NWFP. Syed sees the creation of tented cities as a violation of basic human rights and thinks they would soon turn into ghettos.
The government is appealing to the survivors to come down from the mountainous hamlets and seek shelter in the tent villages but there are people like 80-year old Sughra who refuse despite all hardships.
''I met Sughra in Buttal, in Bagh district. She had lost her husband and her home was completely razed yet she was not willing to move down to the tented village in Muzaffarabad. Instead, she wanted someone to remove the debris of her house where she had saved a paltry sum of five dollars and four sets of clothing,'' said Abdullah.
Civil society organizations are also wary of the concept of tented villages as they open the way for abuse of women and children. Water and sanitation being a problem in canvas settlements also raised the risk of epidemics.
Following the government’s appeal for more tents, as well as placing a ban on its export from this country, the Canvas and Tent Manufacturers and Exporters Association has assured the government of supplying 8,000 tents a day. The association has also pledged suspending four week’s supply of tents to other buyers.
Incidentally, Pakistan is itself one of the world's largest supplier of tents. The UN system has already delivered 32,000 tents and up to 150,000 are on their way.
The Communist Party of Pakistan has suggested asking the Saudi government to loans the tents used during Haj (annual pilgrimage to Mecca). They have even suggested that the 'Tableeghi Jamaat' which manages pilgrimages can be approached for these.
In Karachi, there are people trying to work around this problem innovatively. ''I think we can use panaflex instead of tarpaulin and canvas,'' says Nasir Lotia, an architect, who is designing a makeshift general ward in the front yard of a hospital for women and children, in Abbotabad, a city in NWP that is already using this material.
''The hospital desperately needs another general ward as its own is full. We can set up a 40-bed makeshift tented ward with the help of this material used for making billboards, and we can do it quickly,'' Lotia said.
Panaflex is sturdy and can withstand rough weather and rain and billboards made of it can be seem all over Karachi. ''These, sheets can be used to set up smaller tents, since we’re out of regular tents,'' he said confidently.
One more candidate for quick shelter is a simple spherical frame assembled from ordinary galvanised iron water supply pipes with thick plastic material stretched over it, developed and promoted by the British voluntary agency Oxfam.
Oxfam's Aditi Kapoor told IPS in India that the structure allowed snow and rain to slide off and had the advantage that traditional Kashmiri braziers called 'kangris' that burn smokeless, glowing charcoal or even a stove could be safely lit in them without risk of asphyxiation or starting a fire.
According to Kapoor, Oxfam successfully tried out the shelters in Kosovo. She added that such readily assembled shelters were critical because it was impossible to ship in enough tents into mountainous Kashmir before snow begins to fall, when more deaths from exposure and pneumonia were a certainty. (END/2005)
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