The Quake That Disappeared

When I made my guestimate on October 9 that the Pakistani quake might lead up to 100,000 dead, I'd hoped that that figure would be substantially off.

Sadly, it may not be:

The top United Nations top relief coordinator Jan Egeland, incensed by what he saw as a woefully inadequate international response to the most difficult relief operation the world has ever seen, called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to stage a massive airlift to get survivors to safety.

That would mean helicopters, the only means of getting quickly deep into the rugged Himalayan foothills of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province where 51,000 people are dead. That toll, in addition to some 1,300 who were killed in Jammu and Kashmir, is still expected to rise substantially. Pakistan said the number of injured, now 74,000, could also leap because large quake-hit areas had not yet been reached.

Our own weather woes and political scandals de jour have all but erased this from the American mind. You can keep up with the rescue and recover effort at the South Asia Quake Blog.