Focus on shelter in mountain earthquake communities

Muhammad Hyatt, 60, and his brother Muhammad Ashraf, 65, carefully place the last bricks to finish their small two-room shelter in the mountain village of Kot, around 50 km southwest of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. “We’ve built this shelter on our own and we are going to spend the winter under this roof,” Muhammaad Hyatt said in Kot, home to over 400 families in the remote area above the snowline, over two hours’ drive up the steep zigzag road from Muzaffarabad. Both brothers lost their wives in the South Asia earthquake that ripped through Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistani-administered Kashmir on 8 October, claiming the lives of more than 80,000 and rendering more than 3.5 million people homeless. PUTTING UP TEMPORARY SHELTER It took Muhammad Hyatt and his brother, with the help of other family members, less than a couple of days to erect a temporary shelter using wooden beams and rocks salvaged from what remains of their former house. The walls are made of gravel-cement bricks and the roof is covered with corrugated iron sheets provided by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the lead agency for shelter in quake-affected areas. The structure, around 8 M long and 3 m wide, will provide a warm and dry refuge for the two families of seven people. The total cost of the shelter with some insulation material to make it warmer is around US $400, or almost the sum provided by the Pakistani government as initial compensation for collapsed houses and distributed by the Pakistani army to help quake survivors build some shelter against the bitter Himalayan winter. “It will be warm in this shelter when there is over 1.2 m snow outside as there will be special wood sheet cover to protect us from the cold,” Muhammad Hyatt explained. Sanaullah Marwat, an IOM staff member working in the area, said that the extended family would also get waterproof tarpaulins, with mattresses and one quilt per family member as part of a winterisation kit. SOME STILL WITHOUT SHELTER AT HIGH ALTITUDE Although the majority of the estimated 400,000 quake survivors at higher elevations in quake-hit areas have temporary shelter, according to relief workers, there are still some survivors yet to receive help and build shelters for the harsh winter. Since 31 December, heavy snow and rains have battered survivors, many of whom live in tents that have not been properly winterised. “In general, a lot of high altitude villages and union councils have been covered [with hard shelter materials] already. There must be more than 50,000 shelters that have been distributed all over high altitude areas in Muzaffarabad district alone,” Rex Alamban, head of the IOM sub-office in Muzaffarabad, said. “That’s combining military and humanitarian community figures. The challenge now is to find the gaps and we are still finding lots of gaps that have not been covered by the shelter distribution,” Alamban explained. “A few hundred families are left. They were not included in the assessments and they were never found [before] in the assessments, but we are finding them now,” he added. Immediately following the earthquake a lot of shelters, especially [non-winterised} tents, were distributed in high altitude areas as nothing else was available. “At that time, it was deemed providing anything was better than nothing. So they were given these tents,” the IOM official said, adding: “But conditions are changing now because of the winter and we really have to speed up winterising and distribute hard shelter [materials, including corrugated iron sheets, and tools to build them] for the high altitude areas because the tents will not stand heavy snowfall.” The IOM has provided shelter for some 10,000 families in and around Muzaffarabad alone and is to cover some 4,000 more in the area. Maj Farooq Nasir, a spokesman for the Pakistani army in Muzaffarabad, said they had constructed over 65,000 shelters at altitudes of 1,500 m and above. “That is 72 percent of the population living at 1,500 m and above,” he said. “If you add the shelter activities of international organisations and NGOs, that rate will be between 85 and 90 percent,” Farooq added. Some residents of villages above the snowline had said that the problem was a lack of corrugated iron (CGI) sheets. “The main issue we have in our village is CGI sheets. They are not easily available and [are] costly now, prices for them have gone up by over 50 percent since the quake,” Abdul Walid, a resident of Chattian village in Machiara union council, said. LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE The logistical challenge of moving relief items to some villages is huge, relief workers say. For example, big Chinook helicopters can carry up to 5 mt of relief items, but they cannot land in some high altitude areas, as there is not enough flat terrain available for them. “So we have to rely on MI-8 smaller helicopters and even the smaller ones that are provided by the Pakistani military,” Alamban noted. Other relief groups are working on the issue as well. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has distributed shelters to up to 6,500 households, while the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has covered some 40,000 families already with winterisation kits. Meanwhile, Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan, a spokesman for the Pakistani army, said earlier that more than 229,000 temporary shelters had been constructed for people living above the snowline in quake-hit areas.