Remembering Oct 8, 2005: The day the earth shook
In the Bandi Mir Samdani neighbourhood of Muzaffarabad, which skirts the Neelum Valley road and marks the end of the town’s municipal limits, it is hard to stop staring at the mountain in the backdrop.
The mountain appears to have been shorn off; its inner light-grey core is visible. It is hard to imagine the force that caused this.
Asad Kiyani lives in Kiyani Mohalla of Bandi Mir Samdani, across this mountain, which acquired its current shape due to the devastating earthquake ten years ago, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale.
“Whenever I look at the mountain, I am reminded of that harrowing day,” he says, remembering October 8, 2005 when much of northern Pakistan experienced an earthquake that turned towns and villages in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) into graveyards. Thousands were buried under the rubble.
It struck around 8:52 am, hitting the northern districts of AJK and the adjoining areas of KP. In AJK, Muzaffarabad was the hardest hit, mainly because the epicentre of earthquake was just 19 kilometres (12 miles) to its northeast.
“The destruction caused - we had not imagined it in our wildest dreams,” Kiyani adds.
By Tariq Naqash
It was a Saturday and that too of Ramazan and my weekly day off from the BBC, Islamabad. I was jolted out of my bed by a strong quake at 8:50am. Soon after, news began flashing on TV screens about the Margalla Towers apartment building, which had collapsed. I rushed to the location, only to find my colleagues already there, so I returned home. The death toll was 20 by then.
It was around 11am that I received a call summoning me to the BBC office immediately.
I arrived to find a car ready to take me to the northern areas which were believed to have been affected. But no one had any idea about the scale of devastation since the communications infrastructure had completely broken down.
So I left for the north that fateful afternoon, little knowing that I would end up reporting to the world the devastation of Balakot, which lost 10,000 people on Oct 8, 2005. Nobody in government had the slightest of idea at the time about the massive death toll here.
The devastation started becoming visible from Abbottabad where I stopped to buy some iftari. Most people pointed me towards Mansehra.
I dumped my plans for iftari and rushed towards Mansehra, where the main district hospital had accommodated twice its capacity of the injured and dead. Makeshift camps had been set up near the hospital. There, many people told me that the worst-hit town was Balakot. But the road from Mansehra onwards was destroyed. So I decided to walk.
I joined a group of volunteers who were also heading towards Balakot. It was pitch dark by the time we reached our destination. Almost all the houses had collapsed and thousands were under the rubble.
At a crossing, the injured and the dead lay together; people died in front of my eyes. One of the local leaders told me that no help was available.
Many people asked me that if I could reach Balakot, why couldn’t rescue teams and the military? I had to lie that they would come very soon, despite knowing nothing about any rescue plans.
As I started to take a round of the city, a group of parents led me to what they said was the local college, which had been buried during the earthquake. All I could see was a big piece of concrete on the ground. It was the ceiling of the building. The local people were desperately trying to cut through it with anything they could find, even stones, but to no avail. I could hear students crying for help. As I tried to get closer to the concrete, a woman shouted: “Come back. My child is inside.” I stepped back immediately; the shout still echoes in my head.
The next few hours were hell. I kept recording the desperate calls of survivors. Then I left for Mansehra, went back to Islamabad, reported about the quake and left for Balakot again in the morning.
Even then, no rescue teams had arrived, though people from nearby towns were arriving with food, clothes and medicine. A batch of military men came to examine the devastation. People ran towards them, pleading with them to dig out their loved ones – some of them could still be alive.
But they were told flatly that this team was here only to survey, and help would follow after they made their report. People got angry and started shouting slogans that soon turned into cries of mourning as the military men returned to their base camp in Abbottabad without doing much that day.
Months after the quake, the then government announced plans for setting up ‘New Balakot city’ and reserved land for it, too. Ten years later, very few have opted to relocate. Today, life goes on in Balakot as usual, with residents welcoming tourists with open arms. These travellers stop at Balakot for midway snacks or lunch on their way to Naran.
That assignment made me emotionless for life.
There can’t be a bigger tragedy than the earthquake which resulted in the death of more than 70,000 people. I told many more stories later, about the merciless killings by terrorists in Swat, Fata and Islamabad, without my face twisting. Such is the life of a reporter in Pakistan.
By Kalbe Ali
“I have not forgotten for a day that our own government cheated us,” says Junaid Qasim, who was tehsil nazim of Balakot in 2005.
His anger and betrayal stems from the government’s promise to build a new, well-planned Balakot and then failing to do so – ten years after an earthquake destroyed the city.
The 2005 earthquake razed Balakot city. Shortly after the earthquake, when reconstruction began, it was decided that Balakot would be rebuilt elsewhere, as the original city was located on a fault line.
“The location was declared a Red Zone and no construction was allowed here, even makeshift shelters were established as temporary arrangements,” he said.
“As a result, ten years on, we are IDPs living in temporary homes.”
He was referring to the prefabricated houses that dot the landscape. Made of metallic sheets and plywood, these lightweight houses are temporary bungalows. It is not possible to construct another storey over the ground floor.
After the earthquake, all construction was halted – and still is a decade after the tragedy – and everyone was compelled to live in these prefabricated buildings. Even government offices or departments such as the post office, the girls’ school and a small hospital continue to operate in similar, prefabricated buildings.
Reconstruction was to take place in the new city in a new location. Launched in 2007 at Bakrial, the new Balakot was to be 20 km south of old Balakot City and 15 km north of Mansehra. Today, it is an isolated area, characterised by a few villages, a large forest and grazing land.
The total budget for establishing New Balakot city was estimated at Rs14 billion and some Rs1.2 billion have been paid to the landowners of the Bakhrial area, though the possession of the land is yet to be obtained.
According to the plan, around 11,436 acres were to be developed – so far only 14 per cent of this has been developed.
“A large tract of land owned by the forest department is to be used for the city and this parcel too, has not been handed over to Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA),” said Master Maroof, a government school teacher and prominent activist from the area. He alleges that: “The federal government has never even tried to press the KP government to hand over the land.”
According to the original plans, the new Balakot city was scheduled to be completed by 2010; no one even blinked when the deadline passed.
In the process, the destroyed infrastructure was never reconstructed. For example, two bridges over river Kunhar, connecting the people of Balakot living on both sides, have still not been rebuilt.
Similarly, the local roads connecting the villages and adjoining areas with Balakot have also not been repaired.
Worse still is the fact that no one is willing to take responsibility for the delay. The provincial government, the federal government and the ERRA all point fingers at each other, absolving themselves.
Imran Khan visited Balakot in March 2015, accompanied by Chief Minister Pervaiz Khattak, Senator Azam Swati and others. Khan promised that land acquisition for the new Balakot city would be completed in three weeks. But this deadline has also passed.
The KP minister for Local Government and Rural Development Inayatullah Khan visited the area in April 2015 and promised to take up the issue with the chief minister and the federal government, after blaming the local elected representatives for not pushing the matter.
On the other hand, the local MNA and Federal Minister for Religious Affairs Sardar Mohammad Yousuf blames the provincial government, arguing that the acquisition of and the transfer of forest land was “a provincial subject”.
Residents, meanwhile, continue to struggle on, not sure of the future or the present.
The temporary settlements are not enough to cater to the residents’ needs, as many families have grown in the past decade and can no longer live comfortably in the small prefabricated houses.
“Besides, these units catch fire easily, so cooking is a challenge in the winters,” said Zainab Bibi, a resident, who teaches at a local private school.
To cope with this situation, some residents have established a small room with a chimney at a short distance from the main units for cooking. However, this makes life more difficult for the women who get exposed to the rain or snowfall as they go back and forth between the home and the kitchen.
No wonder then that the residents of Balakot speak of betrayal and anger. The sense of injustice has simply grown once it became obvious that the government seems to have abandoned the plans to build a new city.
“Now the officials openly encourage us to start rebuilding at the old site, but it will cost us all our savings to construct a new house,” said a shopkeeper in the newly erected market of Balakot. This new market, made entirely of concrete, was built earlier in 2015, near the magistrate office and lower courts.
But despite the resentment, the residents have taken advantage of the change of heart – construction is taking place.
A large number of factories making cemented blocks are proliferating. Many freshly constructed houses or under construction structures are visible along the road and on the slopes.
However, this activity is still the domain of the well off. The majority of residents live in makeshift, prefabricated homes.
And the anger continues.
Advocate Munir Lughmani, who serves as the convener of the Balakot Basao Tehreek and is a PMLN member of the newly elected council of Mansehra district, criticised the bureaucrats and politicians.
“We had our tehsil headquarter hospital destroyed in the natural disaster but the political disaster has prevented it from being rebuilt,” he told Dawn.
He said that a piece of land close to the original site of the hospital and outside the Red Zone was the property of Communications & Works department (KP); the health department wanted to build the hospital on this land.
“When Muammar Qaddafi offered to build the hospital, C&W refused to part with the land; now that Qaddafi is no longer in this world, the land has finally been transferred to the health department in August 2015,” Mr Lughmani said.
“This attitude of the rulers is one reason why we want a province for Hazara,” said Ahmed Hassan, a veteran journalist from the area.
He narrates the story of a meeting of local residents with the ERRA chairman some three years; apparently, the chairman said that provincial government and the bureaucracy were not interested in Balakot. “He told us that if Mardan had been destroyed in the earthquake, the new city would have been visible by now.”