Pakistan Disaster Toll May Double To Over 100,000

Like Katrina, but far more extensive, it’s a disaster after a disaster, and it’s preventible:

Doctors are having to amputate the limbs of many survivors because they have gone so long without help, he said. Many more lack shelter as night temperatures plunge below freezing, with the full force of winter only a few weeks away.

“This disaster may have the number of people who died after the disaster bigger than those killed by the earthquake,” U.N. chief aid coordinator Rashid Khalikov said at his tent office in the wrecked city of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir.
Bad weather in the mountains grounded the vital helicopter fleet at the main airbase near Islamabad on Wednesday.

With the known quake death toll at more than 54,000, relief workers had until the end of November to provide shelter, treat the countless injured and supply food, Khalikov said.

“What these communities will have by December 1 is what they will have to live with,” he said.

“We basically have four weeks to deliver.”

There was a time when this was considered a moving statement of some moral truths about humankind’s obligations. But that wasn’t good enough. We now have this expression of sympathy for the less fortunate to guide us.

And what is our Compassionate Leader doing? Well, it turns out the US has pledged a whopping 50 million bucks for earthquake relief. Who says Bush is stingy? That’s nothing to sneeze about. Why, that’s at least 1/3 the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster these days and let’s face it: where’s that money better spent, huh?

Oh, and Pakistan estimates that it will take 100 times the current US committment of funds to rebuild the earthquake area (see here. )