Saturday, October 08, 2005

Quake toll 18000?


Yahoo is reporting a Pakistani general saying that the death toll from the quake could reach 18,000.

... heu, haec vale lacrimarum!

1 comment:

assiniboine said...

Yes, but unlike other earthquakes disasters in west and central Asia -- Turkey and Iran most notably in recent years -- the most catastrophic losses are in the rural hinterland, not the cities. Rawalpindi-Islamabad is of course a smallish and a very low-rise city and its buildings are for the most part made to last. (Anomalously, the apartment building in Islamabad which collapsed is in an affluent area and for once the urban poor were spared.) In the hinterland, alas, it is much different and one realises that the lack of population density of the Punjab -- it always reminds me of Manitoba or Saskatchewan -- is relative.

(A friend in Islamabad contacted me to report shortly after the earthquake had woken him. A relatively trivial earthquake by the standards of, say, the South Pacific, but houses made of bamboo and sago thatch don't fall down during earthquakes and if they do they don't cause much harm.)