Kashmir, Pakistan Earthquake Case Study

Location: The epicentre of the earthquakr was in Muzaffarabad, 60miles northeast of the country's capital Islamabad.

Occured at 8:50am in October - during ramadam in winter

Plate Boundary: Eurasian-IndoAustralian destructive plate boundary, the collision of these plates has created the folded mountains known as the Himalays and consequently the region is notorious for seismic activity

Magnitude: 7.6 Focus Depth - 16-20km (shallow)  Severity of Impact: 8 mercalli scale (even well built structures are damaged)

Aftershocks: 147 in 24hours 

• Killed 75,000 people amd injured 79,000 more - largely children how were at school and adults who were asleep again
• 4 million made homless
• US$5.4billion/400billion rupees- 5% of GDP 
• caused landslides
• Destruction of roads - 12 days after the quake, 120,000 people had not yet been reached by relief workers
• 200 hospitals in the region were destroyed - people started dying from treatable injuries/diseaes
• only 3/5ths of the shelter promised ever became avaliable
• 2.3million lost their food supply - long term financial penalty if they were to eat properly

Little Prediction and Monitoring 

people were also unaware of how they should react to protect themselves during the quake

$6.2billion in humanitarian aid was donated from the international community

Pakistan Army and Medical Corps mobilised for rescue and relief effort - foreign aid workers were reportedly shot at as the region is suspicious of outsiders

Government criticised for investing money into non developmental funding and false statistics - took a year for basic supplies like water supplies to return to prequake levels

UNICEF taught to use rubble to build shelter