Pak toll 1,000, more feared dead

Estimates of its magnitude varied from 6.8 to 7.8, with the United States Geological Survey putting the number at 7.6. Its epicentre was roughly 60 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, where aftershocks could be felt for as long as 10 minutes.

“The earthquake today was the biggest in the upper parts of the country in the last hundred years,” said Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of Pakistan’s Meteorological Department. He added, “Up till now, 20 significant aftershocks between 5 and 6.2 magnitude have been recorded.”

In Islamabad, Margalla Towers, an upscale five-tower apartment complex, took the city’s biggest hit from the quake, as one tower collapsed and part of another fell.President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz visited the apartment complex; speaking to state television later, Musharraf called the tragedy “a test for all of us” and said, “We are sure we will pass this test.”

The gravest damage was believed to be in the North-West Frontier Province’s Mansehra district, where landslides wiped out entire villages, Interior Minister Ahmed Aftab Sherpao said. Some 400 children were killed at two schools here, while officials said 70 per cent of the houses in the district had collapsed.

But the worst-hit area appeared to be Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and its capital, Muzaffarabad. Sherpao said the Kashmir government had told him that casualties were already in the hundreds and could reach 1,000.

The quake occurred along one of the Earth’s great collision zones. The Indian subcontinent rides on a tectonic plate attached to Antarctica until 150 million years ago. It broke away and moved north. About 50 million years ago, the plate slammed into Asia, and the buckling of earth created the Himalayan mountains. The Indian subcontinent continues to move north at more than an inch a year.

Because the quake on Saturday was shallow, 6 to 10 miles underground, the shaking on the surface was probably more intense than other earthquakes of its magnitude, said Waverly J. Person, a seismologist with the US National Earthquake Information Centre. “These are the most damaging earthquakes,” he said, —NYT