SPARC & SSP respond - The Gujarat Earthquake
Rapid Earthquake Assessment By Citizen's Initiatives
Kutch Navnirman Abhiyan - how you can contribute Earthquake Relief
Lessons Shared from the Turkey Earthquake

Some Reports/Stories from the Area
Death, destruction, yet warmth
Enough relief but no coordination
Efficiency amid chaos
It could take months to clear Bhuj rubble

More stories at: www.awasnet.org

Death, destruction, yet warmth
By Kalpana Sharma

BHUJ, JAN. 30. Four days after Friday's earthquake, this city remains a logistical nightmare for those planning relief. For one, the airport, part of an Indian Air Force base, is stretched to the limit in trying to cope with incoming relief and commercial aircraft. Yesterday, for instance, all traffic was affected because the Prime Minister arrived for an aerial survey.

The commercial airlines have no communication with their offices in Mumbai, Delhi or Ahmedabad except through the Air Traffic Control at the airport. As a result, they cannot inform passengers about the flight schedules.

At the airport itself, the tight security keeps passengers and visitors waiting for hours outside the gates of the air base. Meanwhile, planes carrying relief supplies and army personnel and taking out people land and take off with regularity.

Once the supplies have landed, there is little planning about how they will reach the city or the affected villages. Yesterday, cooked food and water sachets sent for the quake victims were distributed to the hordes of passengers waiting to fly out of Bhuj. Otherwise, the food would have rotted.

Until yesterday, there were no transport arrangements from the airport. You would have to walk the five km to the city or hitch a ride. Once in, there is practically no private transport though a few buses have begun plying. Most of them are packed with people leaving for places they feel are safer.

Airlines besieged

The commercial airlines, which have restored services to the city, are virtually under siege. They have few staff; many of their people are affected by the quake. There is hardly anyone available to load and unload baggage. The airport terminal building has been destroyed. Passengers are taken in a bus directly to the aircraft, frisked by one or two policemen who manage to report for duty, and then allowed to board. The entire operation can take over an hour against the normal 20 minutes.

Every flight into the city carries people who have come to look for their relatives.

One such person is Mr. Ashfaque Wahedna from Mauritius. His family went there from Kutch three generations ago. He has married a woman from Bhuj who was visiting her family with her two young children while he attended a meeting in Pune. Then the quake struck. Mr. Wahedna could not contact his family; he did not know whether they had survived. He flew in here on Sunday. At the airport, there was no transport to take him into the city. He hitched a lift into town. After that he did not know where to go.

With difficulty he found the house where his wife was supposed to have stayed. It was intact but empty. For hours he walked through the city asking people where the family could be. He was lucky. He found his wife, two-year-old son and 10-month- old daughter safe in one of the open camps in the city. His little daughter, safe in his arms, smiled for the first time during the flight to Mumbai on Monday.

Amazing generosity

Everyone you meet has a story like this. At the same time, the tremendous generosity of people in such crisis is also amazing. The city has no hotels today where a visitor can stay. There are no shops where you can buy emergency supplies or medicines. There are no restaurants or eating places. The government circuit house is also destroyed.

If you go there as a relief worker, or as a journalist, you have to sleep in the open like all others in the city. Even the Collector and senior bureaucrats have been sleeping in the compound of the collectorate. Yet, people go out of their way to help you. This correspondent, along with other journalists, was not only accommodated for a night in a bus parked outside a private house, but given extra quilts and blankets to survive the bitterly cold night, and given a hot cup of tea in the morning.

Enough relief but no coordination
By Kalpana Sharma

BHUJ, JAN. 29. Three days after the massive earthquake that devastated Gujarat, particularly Kutch, there are still villages where no help has reached. One such village is just five to seven kilometres from Bhuj.

Sukhpar village has been flattened. You would not know this if your drove past it. But walk through any lane and you see scenes reminiscent of the devastation in Latur, Maharashtra, in 1993. Beautiful old houses, temples, new constructions are now just a pile of rubble, twisted metal, glass shards and personal belonging strewn all over the place.

Even this relatively well-to-do village, with a majority of Patels, is in a state of shock. Families huddle together under bamboo and tarpaulin-covered tents. They have pooled their resources, run a community kitchen and have survived three nights in the open. ``We have helped ourselves,'' says Pramilaben. But no one from the Government has yet come to find out what they need. The lone earthmover removing rubble belongs to a private contractor.

Like many other village in Kutch, Sukhpar has links stretching across the world. Mr. N.V. Budia, a postal worker in England, stands sadly in front of his half-completed house. ``I moved to England in 1967 and decided to build a house here so that I could come and go. This earthquake has changed all that.''

Not far from his house is a Swami Narayan temple built by the community with contributions from their kin living abroad. Its 100-ft-high tower has been knocked sideways. Adjacent to the temple is a house where the owner ambitiously provided a ramp on which he would drive his brand-new Indica. Today, the ramp has collapsed and the car squashed below a cement slab.

Such scenes have become the norm in village after village in the dry and relatively inhospitable terrain of Kutch. Structures weak and apparently strong have not been able to withstand the quake and the aftershocks.

The task of calculating the toll and assessing damage to property is virtually impossible, given the spread of the tragedy. The civil administration is seriously strapped because the State continues to be without electricity, water and telephone links.

Open-air collectorate

The collectorate of Bhuj is working in the open air. The collector conducts meetings on his lawns, surrounded by debris. Ham radio operators are his only way of keeping contact. Teams of volunteers turn up asking what they should do. In the midst of such acute infrastructure problems, there appears to be no central direction coming out of the local administration.

As a result, one lot of volunteers does not know that the other exists, though they could help each other. On January 27, a team of 25 doctors flew in from Delhi with the Defence Minister, Mr. George Fernandes. They included surgeons and senior faculty from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences. But having arrived, they found no one to direct them.

They are now operating in a makeshift tent in the Jubilee Maidan in the heart of the city in a camp run by the RSS. The doctors work without electricity and do what they can to mend limbs and bandage wounds. They face an acute shortage of splints and stretchers. They have even been forced to conduct amputations in these conditions.

Their urgent need for at least a temporary operation theatre cannot be fulfilled because there is no electricity and the civil hospital has been destroyed. These specialists say they are doing no more than advanced first-aid as streams of wounded continue to pour in.

Doctors give up, return

Unknown to this team, a group of doctors from Mumbai flew into Bhuj on Sunday. They brought with them a portable generator, tables that could be used for operations, sterilisers and medicines. After a day of trying to find out where they should go, they gave up and returned to Mumbai with their equipment. The absence of a central control room to monitor relief measures is already becoming evident. While it may be too early to judge - as the task of finding the living under the debris is the most urgent - it is clear that a system needs to be established urgently.

Ms. Sushma Iyengar, representing a coalition of NGOs working in Bhuj, says the need of the hour is supplies and not more people pouring into Bhuj. She says the city will collapse if supplies continue to arrive in an unplanned manner and volunteers appear without knowing what to do.

Instead of ensuring that food reached the areas where no help has been given, trucks drive through Bhuj distributing prepared packets of food and sachets of water to whoever happens to be around. This, says Ms. Iyengar, is not a constructive way to help in the present crisis.

Efficiency amid chaos
By Kalpana Sharma

BHUJ, JAN. 30. In contrast to the chaos in the rest of the city, the rescue teams that have arrived from other countries are the epitome of quiet efficiency and organisation. The U.K. Shelter and Rescue team, for instance, landed in Ahmedabad on Sunday morning and came here by road the same day. By the evening they had surveyed 17 buildings and identified eight individuals alive and trapped in them. By 9.30 p.m. they had pulled out seven-year- old Sonu and his mother, Binduben, from an apartment block.

The team manager, Mr. James Brown, says they are always ready to fly out whenever disaster strikes anywhere in the world. Following the quake on January 26, the British government offered to send the team, the Indian government accepted and within two days the team had left.

Its composition is also interesting. One-third of the 69-member group working here consists of professional fire service personnel. The rest are volunteers - plumbers, electricians and others trained in rescue work. The team put together by the UK Fire Service, and the International Rescue Corps and Rapid UK, both voluntary organisations, is paid by the British Government through its Department of International Finance and Development.

We met the crew after at the Sri Hari Niwas apartments, a five- year-old seven storey building which had sunk into the ground and only the top four floors were visible. The woman and child who were rescued were stuck on the first floor. The woman had wedged herself under a chair.

The crew activated their vibraphone, an ultra- sensitive instrument that can detect the slightest sound, even a person breathing, and heard the little boy crying. As soon as they had established the location, they carefully drilled a hole and lowered a microphone. One of the firemen who could speak Gujarati reassured the child and lowered a bottle of water.

After that, they enlarged the hole and pulled the boy out. They then located the woman and gradually pulled her out too. The entire operation took around five hours. Miraculously, neither the boy nor his mother had any serious injuries.

It could take months to clear Bhuj rubble
By Kalpana Sharma

BHUJ, JAN. 30. The maximum destruction caused by the earthquake in Bhuj is inside the old, walled city. Large sections of the wall, built in 1723, have been destroyed. And within them, the crowded and narrow lanes, typical of such old towns, are a picture of destruction.

Despite the devastation, people maintain a sense of humour. Dineshbhai, whose shop in the old city has been destroyed, says philosophically, ``Today there are no crore-patis in Bhuj, all of us have become `road-patis'.'' He takes us on a guided tour of the now-destroyed city where some shops did crores of rupees of business in gold and jewellery. According to a local real estate agent, property prices in the old city were as high as Rs. 12,000 per sq.ft.

After the quake, not a single building is safe. Even beautiful old buildings with a gracious courtyard and stained glass windows - with the legend `Shah Karamchand Lalchand' etched on the stone archway leading in - are in a shambles. They will all have to be pulled down.

The narrow lanes of the old city contributed to the high death toll. The unmistakable stench of rotting flesh is evidence of the many bodies that lie buried beneath the rubble. Dineshbhai says that on Friday morning they heard a terrifying sound as the earth began to move and parts of buildings began to fall. A huge cloud of dust covered everything. As people ran out of the lanes - many people lived above their shops - they were crushed by the falling masonry. Only the more able escaped. He says many older people died as they could not move out quickly enough.

According to doctors treating the wounded in Bhuj, most of the injuries are spinal and broken legs, particularly the femur. Many of the patients they have treated are older women. Without x-ray equipment, the doctors can only do a clinical diagnosis and place the broken limb in a plaster with the hope that it will mend. Usually, for a broken femur an operation is essential.

It is the very topography of these old cities that makes rescue operations virtually impossible. You cannot move in any heavy machinery.

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